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Chinese translations on WEB Ch7 is about half done, this part is a lot longer than previous parts. Here’s a summary of it (will be continued in my next post):

Spoiler for Ch7 1st half:

This chapter really shows how bad it can get when humans try to pose as gods. Intellectually we readers understood UW was created as an experiment, but it's another to see the place designed for bloodshed and the recreation of pillage and war first hand emotionally through the narrative.

Kirito and Eugeo was captured by Alice before, they escaped the dungeons, and before they got hunted down they were rescued by a girl that looked around 10 years old with light brown hair but talked like a old woman (more precisely, a old woman using old English, with her words in English approximately using words like ‘Thou’ and so on). Using ‘magic’ Eugeo and Kirito was taken into a library that housed the records of everything in UW since its creation, the coding for the world and the System Command lists. The girl revealed herself to be named ‘Cardinal’ (as in, from the Cardinal System – explanation will come up later). As Kirito understood it the Cardinal System does not have a anthropomorphic avatar of sorts, even in games like ALO and GGO. Kirito and Eugeo was given food to heal all their wounds taken from escaping, and Eugeo asked where the history section of UW is, and Cardinal pointed him to the ‘Corridor of History’. After Eugeo left Cardinal sighed and said the history of the world and those records are only fakes written by the priests, and Kirito took the chance to clarify some things (Flere821 note: go make a sandwich, grab a drink or something, this is going to take a while to explain).

The three gods as UW know it does not exist, only as accounts with more abilities than others – and those accounts have never logged into UW even once before now. Cardinal confirmed this world is made by Rath, and she’s a offshoot of the Cardinal System designed by Kayaba. Cardinal was surprised Kirito knew about Kayaba, and found how Kirito knew other versions of the Cardinal interesting.

Cardinal went through how Feudalism came to be set up in UW – the developers didn’t put that in themselves. Cardinal doesn’t have the means to talk to the ‘Real World’, that is something only the Adminstrator of UW have. Because of certain events (will be explained later) Cardinal has lost a lot of her abilities, and unlike the other Cardinal systems Kirito knew she’s not omniscient within the setting. Back to the topic of Feudalism, of the four humans that took care of the first Fluctlights one of them was not the morally upright person Rath thought he was. It may have been unintentional, but his ambition, desire to satisfy his own wants, and desire to control others – basically the darker side of human nature – have infected two of the 8 fluctlights. (As an aside, Cardinal cannot access the names of the four people; so Kirito couldn’t be forewarned by who within Rath might be a traitor or intending to harm him). These negative traits was bred out if people married lower class nobles or commoners, but for those that maintained blood purity of ‘nobility’ there was a much higher chance of inheriting these negative traits (like the scheming rapists from previous chapter). The current Pope is the one that led to Feudalism being installed, and she had taken the name ‘Adminstrator’. (Kirito was surprised that the Pope was a ‘she’ – to him Popes are normally wizened old men with plenty of life experience). In a sense, the Adminstrator was Cardinal’s mother (more on that later).

Feudalism was installed 350 years ago, 100 years after the experiment started. At the time UW citizens are married around 20, and each family have on average 5 children. By 5th generation the population of UW is around 500 people (marriage and birth mechanics will be skipped here, it’s a aside to the plot).
From these people, the ones with domination desires took the land of people around them and became leaders, and made people who lost their land servants. Those that disagreed with them went to pioneer other settlements near the outer edge. There was hostility between the various leaders, and there is very little marriage between them. This all changed when from one of these few political marriages a girl named Kuniela (Note: I’m bad with names, so this might not be the correct spelling) was born. She had the strongest negative desires of people being born ever at that time. She was amazingly talented, in multiple areas such as sword skill, system commands, singing, sewing etc. She could have excelled in any lifelong career she was assigned to, but her father that was in charge of giving them wanted to keep her close by and gave her the career of practicing system commands (ie, like a priest). Kuniela figured out system commands aren’t meaningless words, but of a different language, and eventually figured out a spell to launch fire arrows.

She then took advantage of the ‘exp system’ of UW, by defeating other creatures in UW you can gain exp in the ‘System Access Authority’ of UW. Most people are kind-natured, and do not like to harm animals without reason, but the tainted nobility was the exceptions. At age 11 Kuniela went on nightly hunting trips killing foxes and other animals, and to keep the balance the Cardinal (before she had a sense of self) replenished the surroundings as per the system. Kirito understood the idea, he went level grinding himself back in SAO, but for some reason he felt horrified at what Kuniela has done. It’s like something from a nightmare, a small girl dressed in her pyjamas and unflinchingly burning anything she came across at night. Kuniela’s level increased steadily, along with her understanding of system commands. She eventually mastered healing and weather forecasting, and along with her beauty by age 13 she seemed like an angel or divine descent.

Cardinal said Rath the biggest mistake they made was introducing the concept of God to explain the system commands. To humans, the existence of the divine is the most effective painkiller, with it humans can endure any kind of pain, and commit any kind of sins without guilt. With Kuniela’s deeds she established a Church and her own ‘divine’ authority she established herself as the ruler of UW. Kirito thought Kuniela had some decency left in her, or otherwise why add further restrictions in killing when the system forbid it? Cardinal explained it was because Kuniela didn’t want anyone else to reach the same power as she did, and killing humans is one of the fastest ways to gain exp.

Cardinal also refuted Kirito’s claims humans by nature are kind-hearted beings – UW citizens are only this way because of Rath’s meddling. The Goblins from Dark Territoty Kirito had met that had tried to kill him and Eugeo are also Fluctlights, given the opposite commands as the ones in UW; to kill, to forcibly take things, they are the product of fluctlights following the more basic human desires. Kirio had known something was off when he fought them, those weren’t like NPCs; their movements were too natural, they had sparks of life in their eyes. But he had never thought this might be the case. Kirito was tormented for a moment how he had killed another human (the Goblin captain), before Cardinal cut him off of his thoughts. He is not God, and there are some things that can’t be solved even after one or two hundred years of thought.

Cardinal thought of herself as a God once, and intervened in the world uncaring of what life actually is, following the laws of the world. It was only after obtaining a body that she started thinking about life. The world’s creators, Rath, probably have no idea what they have created and even then they are not omnipotent Gods. With the coming pressure experiments UW as it is now will become a living hell. Back to Kuniela, the Church’s laws was expanded (like do not feed sheep certain types of grass that will take away their ability to produce milk, or do not go into bogs that have poisonous gasses) and people lost their ability to think for themselves and relied on the Church for almost everything. They no longer question the authority of the Church. The main cathedral, first from a measly 3 floor high building eventually became higher and higher, like a symbol of her insatiable desires. Kuniela reached age 30, then 40, her body slowly being influenced by age. She left ruling UW to her minions and tried to research a way to extend her life, breaking the bounds of age. Her efforts produced no results however, and by the time she was over 60 her body was frail and her beauty was all gone. On her deathbed at age 80 she refused to give up however, and tried all kinds of combinations to find a way. Cardinal said Kuniela’s chances of success was smaller than throwing a thousand coins and expects them all to land heads up… but she succeeded. Even Cardinal was horrified at her obsession.

The command “System Call: Inspect Entire Command List” opened up an A4 sized window that basically gave her access to the root code of the world. Cardinal said this was another huge mistake Rath made, they should have eliminated this command after the four was logged out. At the bottom of the list was the command she needed, the emergency command that allows someone to take control of the world to restore balance – take control of all of the Cardinal System’s abilities and make yourself literally the God of the world. Kirito thought Rath really could not have kept this world under control; all of their personnel was basically in their thirties, and Kuniela had 80 years of life experience by then to find a way to break the system. Rath controlling the situation now was even less likely, with Kuniela having about another 300 years of experience.

Kirito’s worry was interrupted by Cardinal – she said it’s too early to start being afraid.
To build things up for later explanation, Cardinal explained how when the four humans was raising their kids there were other NPCs around them – after all, it’s strange for a world to only have two families. These were limited AIs, artificial Fluctlights without their own will.

Anyway, after Kuniela found this command she reset her age to 16 and removed the upper limit to her age. Kuniela was ecstatic to have recovered her youth and beauty, which Cardinal remarked no male would ever understand how happy she would have been. Kirito remarked that even he knew that’s the dream of all women, but Cardinal’s wasn’t convinced at his understanding. Cardinal remarked even she would have preferred an appearance maybe 5-6 years older than what she had right now…
Putting that aside, Cardinal continued on with her narration. Kuniela’s reasoning was affected by the joy of eternal youth and beauty, plus command over human territory. Cardinal seemed to be either laughing at human foolishness here, or maybe pitying it. Kuniela’s desire knows no bounds, and she could not accept another entity having the same authority as she did. Even if that entity is the Cardinal System, a program without its own will. Kuniela spent the night reading the instruction manual to use the full command list, but she only has a limited understanding of it because ultimately she’s a citizen of UW and not a scientifically-minded human. She tried to incorporate the Cardinal System into her own self, and she made her one and only mistake then. The motivation for the Cardinal System ended up overwriting her own desires within her own Fluctlight, and this was irreversible. Cardinal said it was a pity the Cardinal System’s driving motivation was not incompatible with Kuniela’s, as her Fluctlight would have broken apart under the paradox and solved a lot of problems right there. The motivation was ‘keep the current state as it is’ – as Kirito knew, if there was a good way to get rich very quickly or to power-level easily the Cardinal System would find it and correct it, for example by re-pricing items or making monsters harder to kill. Cardinal smirked at Kirito’s own complaints how once upon a time (ie, SAO) he and others tried to trick the Cardinal System but ended up failing. She has her own pride that no matter how many brats gather they can’t beat the system (ie, herself), this gave her a look more matching her 10-year old body that her old woman atmosphere earlier.

Due to Kuniela’s change, she wanted to keep things as it is so she used her new powers to make the walls separating the UW into quarters and declared the four most powerful nobles as Kings. This decreases human interaction and new ideas that can result from those, and things have stayed the same for 270 years after that. When before Kuniela had considered a reform to make things for the better for the commoners, now she no longer cares and strangles any signs of change. She placed similar symbols around UW to limit the pioneers’ expansion, such as boulders that can’t be broken, streams that can’t be crossed, trees that can’t be cut down etc. 50 years after Administrator took power nothing have changed and nobility has stagnated, and became even more worthless than before. 70 years after Kuniela became Administrator, she found she reached the limits of human memory – she lost memory of things that happened a few days before, occasionally when sleeping she loses consciousness, and she forgot some of the system commands from before. To address this Kuniela took in one of the Sisters-in-training that was in the cathedral and said she’ll make her the successor of UW. From the description the sister was only about 10 years old and with light brown hair, which Kirito deduced it’s talking about Cardinal in front of her. Kuniela attempted to overwrite the girl’s Fluctlight with her own, as a spare copy in case when she tries to fix herself by erasing some memories she breaks some part of her own soul. The same way people make back-up copies of important files before messing with them.

However, this was the second mistake Kuniela made; when her back-up copy was made and before she fixed herself, there was two Administrators in the same room with equal power. The Cardinal System split off, one is the main system that checks the entire game and the other became a subsystem to check the main system for bugs. Exactly like the SAO Cardinal system Kirito was familiar with. The second core system was the Cardinal which is in front of Kirito right now, finally free after being taken into Kuniela 70 years before she left. In a sense this Cardinal was a split personality of the original Kuniela given form. While Kirito stated in real life the existence of split personalities are debatable Cardinal said that was a good fit for what happened to them in UW. This Cardinal was operating when Kuniela’s desires was not that high at times, and when she was conscious she tried to correct the mistakes Kunela made. Cardinal attempted many suicides (jumping off the top of the cathedral (100 floors high) – 3 times. Stabbing self in the heart – 2 times. Using system command to burn herself alive – 2 times) to correct what Kuniela had accomplished. Even as the Administrator, if her health goes to zero she will still be destroyed. With literally the final drop of HP left Kuniela regained control of her body, so Cardinal could not finish the job.

To stop Cardinal killing her, Kuniela sealed away her own emotions and perfected the ‘Ritual of Synthesis’, basically cutting apart people’s fluctlights and stripping them of their personalities. The Synthesis Knights was basically the test subjects, in exchange for near-immortality and skills beyond mortals they are only puppets of Kuniela. Administrator is now like a machine, and only when Kuniela tried to make a back-up copy did Cardinal manage to free herself. After they saw each other when Kuniela finished operating on herself and deleting some memories, she failed to instantly eliminate Cardinal. Both of them felt fear that one of them is the exact same copy of themselves and they fought. Instinctive enmity and fear led them to fight, two Gods warring for three days and night upon the top of the cathedral. The original fluctlight in the 10 year old girl’s collapsed from the strain first, and that led to a fundamentally difference between Kuniela and Cardinal enough to make them seem different.

Kirito asked how the Administrator could break the taboo of killing another human, and Cardinal explained it’s a matter of perception. She demonstrated the rules of ‘teacup cannot directly touch the table, it needs a saucer underneaths it’ – even after so many years she could not bring herself to break that deeply ingrained rule from Kuniela’s childhood, but change the cup’s content from ‘tea’ to ‘soup’ she could put the cup down directly; it’s no longer a ‘tea’cup but a ‘soup’cup. Most people would not even be able to think about why they can’t put the teacup down directly, but people with high enough ‘hidden value’ of rule breaking tendencies could. The rapist that tried to kill Eugeo did something similar, he saw Eugeo as one of the Dark Territory residents in disguise and not a human, hence his ability to attempt to kill Eugeo. Cardinal mused if this inability to break rules was something Rath built into UW humans, and Kirito decided that’s impossible – they built the experiment in trying to break rules, not the other way around. (Flere821 note: They did find out by the end of this arc a US spy had written in some codes into UW that wasn’t part of Rath’s design, this was one of them)

Before back on topic again, Kirito also asked for a helping of the corn soup Cardinal has. Cardinal snarked how Kirito really is a glutton before complying (Flere821 note: let’s see, the ‘hotdogs’ from Warmth of the Heart, his obsession with Asuna’s sandwich/food, the number of times he went off to buy snacks in UW before trotting back to a worried Eugeo… yeah, can’t argue with that ).
The final stages of the battle was Kuniela creating a zone of no system commands can be used, and spawned the most powerful weapon available in existence to physically fight. Seeing no choice Cardinal did the same and summoned her staff. Kuniela found one advantage she had; Kuniela had a 16 year old’s body, while Cardinal only had a 10 year old’s. Cardinal demonstrated this by standing up and taking off her robe, showing her small chest with white bra and her black shorts; her body doesn’t have the reach or strength (and the TL notes there’ll probably be this picture when the LN comes out, as there’s ALWAYS fanservice pics of some kind). Kirito noted similar things happened in SAO, where someone’s real life reach differes from other players’ and they had a disadvantage, or how in ALO their race’s trait (such as being large/small in size) is different to their real life body and they can’t get used to it.
The battle ended up as melee combat and Cardinal couldn’t physically match Kuniela, even though Cardinal made the first strike in system command attacks and Kuniela would have had her fluctlight destroyed the instant before her own one did. After three exchanges of strikes Cardinal lost. It was fortunate Kuniela sealed the use of system commands first before she sealed the room, otherwise Cardinal might not have escaped.
Cardinal spoke about the horror of being chased by Kuniela with her blade , feeling slashes onto her back. Kirito agreed that must have been horrifying, and Cardinal shot back Kirito needed to feel the same terror of a woman chasing after him with a weapon from all the womanizing he did within the last 2.5 years. Kirito fervently denied he did any such thing, then realised Cardinal has been stalking observing him for quite a while now.

Cardinal escaped, into one of two places even the Administrator cannot freely travel to. One is the Dark Territory, the other is the library of records they’re in right now. This library was created by the Administrator as a external storage space for her knowledge, and she made it impossible for others to access it. It takes a specific system command to access this place, and Cardinal used it before Kuniela did and locked the place up behind her. It’s easier to lock things up than to break it with system commands, and by the time Kuniela almost broke through the lock Cardinal made the library her’s and made the entrance disappear from the physical location in UW. The fact this library does not have a real physical location in UW to be broken into as part of the security played against Kuniela here. If they broke the walls all there will be is the void. Thus began Cardinal’s lonely experience for 200 years.

Kirito can’t even begin to understand how can someone live this long by herself, before remembering a human only have about 150 years of memory available to them; how does Cardinal here still function, then? Even with system commands Cardinal could not create something from nothing, so she can’t make a back-up just in case. The alternative, safer way she did was to erase all her memory as ‘Kuniela’, and 97% of the memory she had as Administrator, after putting them down onto paper (or some other physical records). She had no memory of her parents, how a bed feels like, and no emotion (Flere821 note: although later events – and how she snarked at Kirito before now - suggest she’s not as emotionless as she thinks). Cardinal sees herself solely as a program with the end goal of stopping Kuniela’s reign, no matter what she has to do.
(Flere821 note: I just noticed the narrative seems to suggest Kirito finds Cardinal beautiful whenever she acts like a kid her age rather than a weary old-timer, with words like ‘perfect smile’ and whatnot… goddamn it Kirito, another girl? You damn lolicon…)

Cardinal had tried to fight back within the last 200 years, but there’s a big difference between her and Kuniela – Kuniela has access to many minions and more resources. The Synthesis Knights can tip the scales towards Kuniela’s favour in a direct confrontation. These minions also help her govern the world, so she can lessen the intake of new memories. Now she rests on the top of the cathedral, reliving the memories of her past glory to further reduce additional information.

Kirito raised the point that that is indeed a advantage Kuniela has, but wouldn’t her minions betray her? From his experience in SAO there’s always conflict in large groups, the most notable example was how Divine Dragon’s Alliance ended up disbanded though Heathcliff’s KoB remained stable. (TL note: they look forward to if/when this eventually gets covered in Progressive). Cardinal said no betrayal is possible, due to ‘Ritual of Synthesis’ – they’re all puppets of the Adminstrator. The first Synthesis Knight was the legendary figure from back in Eugeo’s village, and Kirito thought this will be like him facing legendary figures from the past like Musashi. He tried to convince Cardinal this isn’t a shounen manga where after defeat they’ll somehow amazingly power-up, so there’s no way he can win. Cardinal gave him a look of “what the hell are you talking about?”. Of course this isn’t a manga, it’s a light novel =P

After many years the number of Synthesis Knights increased up to 50. Even taking into account border patrols and fighting against the Dark Territory, there will still be around 20 knights here in the Cathedral. Kirito thought it’s practically like he had just left the Town of Beginnings and the final boss dungeon is right in front of him.
Cardinal had been keeping a eye on Kirito, and a number of other people she might be able to recruit. Though most of the ones she found was taken by Kuniela and trained to be her minions, since Cardinal can only rely on her familiars while Kuniela can just open a window and see who has a high value of rule breaking tendencies. Cardinal revealed Charlotte, the familiar she stuck onto Kirito a while back and he never noticed. The winners of the tournaments are also inducted into a Synthesis Knight, the #30-50 are mostly such people. #1-20 are those with a high rule-breaking tendency values she captured. In a sense, Kirito was lucky they didn’t follow the original plan and win the tournament or they might have ended up as puppets.

After constant defeat Cardinal was thinking about giving up within the last 10 years. Kuniela steadily have gained influence while she herself have gained nothing, and have been losing hope. She questioned why it must be herself that corrects Kuniela’s mistakes, and started to yearn for the life she could have had as the 10 year old girl before she was erased; knowing nothing about the world, growing up, raising a family, and be surrounded by them on her deathbed. Originally it was on a whim Cardinal set her personality as a old woman, but now she felt more like one than ever. Rotting away with no future. Not even the Gods, Rath, has any interest in helping her even if they found this out. Kirito then knew Cardinal didn’t actually know about Rath, the real world, or have a connection to them, she figured all the truth of UW out with logic in the last 200 years.
Rath currently have been stepping up on the pressures to human society to try and see if it’ll force UW citizens to break the laws. Armies have started to amass in Dark Territory, and natural disasters have became more common. While the Dark Territory population is only half that of humans, there are vastly more combat-capable individuals in the goblins, beastmen and other races there. With how UW have stagnated and sword forms have been reduced to showmanship, UW will fall if Dark Territory invade. Administrator thinks she can defeat the Dark Territory with only her fifty Synthesis Knights, but Cardinal does not think it’s likely. Either way, the world will end, the only difference is if it’s by Kuniela’s deeds or that of the Dark Territory as they pillage and burn across human lands. 50 knights can’t hold ground, and even Kuniela will be defeated by the thousands of system command users within Dark Territory.

Cardinal knew there is no way out once Rath starts their pressure phase, so she wants to mercy-kill the entire UW, including the Dark Territory. While spending the next several hundred years to incorporate humanity with the other races is the best solution, it is not a possible one from what she has seen. Even if they stop Kuniela they can’t escape from Rath. It’s a military experiment after all, if UW tries to disobey they will just delete the whole thing and start anew. Cardinal likened this to fishes bred for consumption choosing to die by the hands of the fishermen or flop onto land and suffocate through their own actions. Cardinal offers Kirito her help to return back to the real world, if she became Administrator she can do so. In addition, she can use what little power she have to save ten Fluctlights and let them live on in the real world with Kirito. Ten of them is about the number Kirito can feasibly sneak out of Rath anyway, though Kirito doesn’t think he can choose between the ones he has met since coming into UW – and does he have the right to decide who gets to live solely because they have met him?

Cardinal went through how she found out about Kirito and Eugeo, when they cut down a tree that was supposedly to be impossible. Through Charlotte Cardinal found the reasons they got this powerful and how they cut the tree down. After Cardinal saw Kirito did things no UW citizen (little things, like feeding stray dogs) can do she knew Kirito isn’t bound by the laws of the world – if anyone else found that Kirito would have been instantly captured by the Church. And since Kirito isn’t from UW, his soul is in the STL and beyond the reach of the Administrator, so he is the best chance that can fight against the Administrator without being instantly deleted.

Kirito asked why didn’t Cardinal leave all this behind, start a new life and family, instead of spending 200 years in a library by herself? As part of Kuniela her blood from nobility should have been enough to break any bounds left on her by the laws. Cardinal replied as the subsystem her only desire is to stop Kuniela… before she remembered her one other desire. She told Kirito to get up, position his arms in a circle, and after much tsundere actions incoherent orders Kirito found himself hugging Cardinal, with her on a stool so her head is level with Kirito’s. Human contact, after 200 years, and Cardinal thought this as worth all the efforts she had put in so far with a few tears shed. Loneliness and dedication towards a goal will eventually dry up a person’s mind and soul, which needs to be sated by human interactions. Kirito was reminded of his time back in SAO where he dedicated himself to one goal no matter what (training to get that revive crystal) and felt he can sympathize with what Cardinal has went through.
After who-knows-how-long, Cardinal broke off and went back to being a enlightened sage, asking if Kirito is willing to help her. Kirito said yes, though he said he will also be looking for the third option that doesn’t involve everyone dying. Cardinal acknowledged that Kirito’s a hopeless idealist, but that’s within her tolerance. Kirito added he doesn’t want to see Cardinal die – if he had to choose ten people to leave with him, he’ll choose her as one of the ten. (Flere821 & TL Note: Another addition into his harem ^^; xD)
Cardinal’s eyes widened at his claim (Flere821: haremette ‘loli #2’ confirmed as obtained), before giving a sad laugh saying Kirito’s not just a idealist, but also a fool; even if she wants to leave she can’t, she’s part of this world and if she’s gone there’s no-one left to destroy it for the mercy-kill. Kirito says he understand that, but he’s also not giving up. Cardinal said one day he will understand the meaning of despair and giving up; but enough of that, time to go look for Eugeo and plan out their next moves.

Eugeo had finished reading, and asked what’s the time – they lost track of it. Cardinal said it’s been three hours, the sun’s up and it’s about 8am in the morning. Kirito gave a brief explanation on who Cardinal is/was (nothing that will break Eugeo’s mind), such as Cardinal used to be the High Priest and she’s helping them to take down Administrator. Eugeo asked if Cardinal knew anything about Alice; is the Alice from his village the same as Alice Synthesis Fifty? Cardinal said she’s been spending all her attention on him and Kirito, so she doesn’t know – though she says she knows how to remove the brainwashing Administrator had done to the knights. The memory circuit of the knights are sealed, someone they love have been erased from their mind and using that as basis of the change. This was shown when Kirito and Eugeo accidently influenced the brainwashing of Synthesis Twenty-Six they fought when they tried to escape. The memory fragment is the key to return them back to normal. If they want to get that they’ll have to reach the top of the cathedral, since the Administrator is likely to keep those fragments in her own room. Kirito wanted to stop the knights non-violently but Cardinal derided that as futile – all she can do is raise their equipment onto the same level as the Synthesis Knights, not to the point where they can afford to go easy on their opponents. It’s either slaughter a way to victory or die. Kirito asked is she not coming with them, and Cardinal says if she shows up it’ll instantly be the final battle – she’ll gladly go with them if they think they can stop 20 Synthesis Knights at once. Administrator right now still wants to brainwash Kirito and Eugeo, so she’ll be sending her knights after them in 2s and 3s to capture them alive. This way Kirito and Eugeo will still have a chance to victory.

Eugeo said he’s fine with fighting, even killing his opponents, however he can’t fight Alice as that’ll completely deny what he has accomplished within the last 2 years. Cardinal handed him and Kirito each a small dagger that weighed as much as a real sword, saying if that’s the case use these as their trump card; these daggers have no attacking power whatsoever, but if stabbed into their enemy it will have a path established with Cardinal and she can use her spells to take them down. Use it on Alice and she’ll instantly be asleep, and stay that way until they recover her memory fragment. As even system commands can’t create something out of nothing, those daggers are built upon her own sacrifice; a hundred years’ worth of hair. Cardinal joked if Kirito and Eugeo had shown up a month earlier they would be able to see her long hair that was her pride then. Kirito found even Cardinal has some similarities with normal girls in that she has pride in her hair and she felt sad she had to cut it off. These daggers were originally made to use against the Administrator, so make sure when they use it it counts. Eugeo asks if it’s alright for him to use something there’s only two of in the world, and Cardinal says it’s fine. She almost let slip they will all die anyway so it doesn’t matter. Kirito inwardly vowed to include Eugeo, Alice, and Cardinal among the ten he can save, even if he has to trick Cardinal into coming with him. He then shamefully realised that meant he in a way agreed to Cardinal’s solution, but he resolved he’ll save them even at the cost of this world.

Kirito then raised the point if system commands can’t make something out of nothing, then where did the food they ate came from? Cardinal smiled and said all she did was use some worthless history books as raw material. Eugeo, as the history fanatic, choked at this revelation and said no they don’t need any more food when Cardinal offered to make some more.
Kirito had thought they’d get the best gear in-game before remembering Cardinal can’t make something out of nothing. Cardinal started to think if she had chosen the right person after Kirito found out he won’t be getting the stuff he thought he’d get. She then explained even without her they’d still have the best gear anyway, one is a sword belonging to one of 4 dragon knights, the other was made from material of a tree that had absorbed resources from a large area for the past several hundred years. Add to the fact they know how to use these powerful weapons they should be fine. Kirito was reminded of fools in SAO that got some rare drops and then went to test them out, but then their inexperience killed them when the NPCs attacked.

Kirito and Eugeo’s swords are at level 3. Their final destination is at level 100. Kirito had thought this will be a long quest and asked if they can start at level 50 instead, but Eugeo reminded them they wanted to keep the opponent separate. More space to cover means less likely to find the knights all in one place. Cardinal then reminded them of one more thing, that Synthesis Knights have abilities with their weapons that make them a extension of their body and have other special effects. Cardinal gave them 3 hours to write up a code/spell that will unlock their own weapon’s abilities (Kirito’s is a branch, Eugeo’s sword at the very basis is ice that can never melt). The harsh time constraints was because it has almost been 24 hours since they lost their swords, any longer they will lose ownership over it.

Three hours later, Kirito and Eugeo got some sort of code working (though Cardinal said those were really inefficient code) and Cardinal dropped them off close to the room where they have their swords. Cardinal left the world’s fate in their hands and let them decide whether the world will bathe in hellfire, fall into the void, or *looks at Kirito* there may be some third option. They left the room, and started their mission.

Chinese translations on WEB Ch7 is about half done, this part is a lot longer than previous parts. Here’s a summary of it (will be continued in my next post):

Spoiler for Ch7 1st half:

This chapter really shows how bad it can get when humans try to pose as gods. Intellectually we readers understood UW was created as an experiment, but it's another to see the place designed for bloodshed and the recreation of pillage and war first hand emotionally through the narrative.

Kirito and Eugeo was captured by Alice before, they escaped the dungeons, and before they got hunted down they were rescued by a girl that looked around 10 years old with light brown hair but talked like a old woman (more precisely, a old woman using old English, with her words in English approximately using words like ‘Thou’ and so on). Using ‘magic’ Eugeo and Kirito was taken into a library that housed the records of everything in UW since its creation, the coding for the world and the System Command lists. The girl revealed herself to be named ‘Cardinal’ (as in, from the Cardinal System – explanation will come up later). As Kirito understood it the Cardinal System does not have a anthropomorphic avatar of sorts, even in games like ALO and GGO. Kirito and Eugeo was given food to heal all their wounds taken from escaping, and Eugeo asked where the history section of UW is, and Cardinal pointed him to the ‘Corridor of History’. After Eugeo left Cardinal sighed and said the history of the world and those records are only fakes written by the priests, and Kirito took the chance to clarify some things (Flere821 note: go make a sandwich, grab a drink or something, this is going to take a while to explain).

The three gods as UW know it does not exist, only as accounts with more abilities than others – and those accounts have never logged into UW even once before now. Cardinal confirmed this world is made by Rath, and she’s a offshoot of the Cardinal System designed by Kayaba. Cardinal was surprised Kirito knew about Kayaba, and found how Kirito knew other versions of the Cardinal interesting.

Cardinal went through how Feudalism came to be set up in UW – the developers didn’t put that in themselves. Cardinal doesn’t have the means to talk to the ‘Real World’, that is something only the Adminstrator of UW have. Because of certain events (will be explained later) Cardinal has lost a lot of her abilities, and unlike the other Cardinal systems Kirito knew she’s not omniscient within the setting. Back to the topic of Feudalism, of the four humans that took care of the first Fluctlights one of them was not the morally upright person Rath thought he was. It may have been unintentional, but his ambition, desire to satisfy his own wants, and desire to control others – basically the darker side of human nature – have infected two of the 8 fluctlights. (As an aside, Cardinal cannot access the names of the four people; so Kirito couldn’t be forewarned by who within Rath might be a traitor or intending to harm him). These negative traits was bred out if people married lower class nobles or commoners, but for those that maintained blood purity of ‘nobility’ there was a much higher chance of inheriting these negative traits (like the scheming rapists from previous chapter). The current Pope is the one that led to Feudalism being installed, and she had taken the name ‘Adminstrator’. (Kirito was surprised that the Pope was a ‘she’ – to him Popes are normally wizened old men with plenty of life experience). In a sense, the Adminstrator was Cardinal’s mother (more on that later).

Feudalism was installed 350 years ago, 100 years after the experiment started. At the time UW citizens are married around 20, and each family have on average 5 children. By 5th generation the population of UW is around 500 people (marriage and birth mechanics will be skipped here, it’s a aside to the plot).
From these people, the ones with domination desires took the land of people around them and became leaders, and made people who lost their land servants. Those that disagreed with them went to pioneer other settlements near the outer edge. There was hostility between the various leaders, and there is very little marriage between them. This all changed when from one of these few political marriages a girl named Kuniela (Note: I’m bad with names, so this might not be the correct spelling) was born. She had the strongest negative desires of people being born ever at that time. She was amazingly talented, in multiple areas such as sword skill, system commands, singing, sewing etc. She could have excelled in any lifelong career she was assigned to, but her father that was in charge of giving them wanted to keep her close by and gave her the career of practicing system commands (ie, like a priest). Kuniela figured out system commands aren’t meaningless words, but of a different language, and eventually figured out a spell to launch fire arrows.

She then took advantage of the ‘exp system’ of UW, by defeating other creatures in UW you can gain exp in the ‘System Access Authority’ of UW. Most people are kind-natured, and do not like to harm animals without reason, but the tainted nobility was the exceptions. At age 11 Kuniela went on nightly hunting trips killing foxes and other animals, and to keep the balance the Cardinal (before she had a sense of self) replenished the surroundings as per the system. Kirito understood the idea, he went level grinding himself back in SAO, but for some reason he felt horrified at what Kuniela has done. It’s like something from a nightmare, a small girl dressed in her pyjamas and unflinchingly burning anything she came across at night. Kuniela’s level increased steadily, along with her understanding of system commands. She eventually mastered healing and weather forecasting, and along with her beauty by age 13 she seemed like an angel or divine descent.

Cardinal said Rath the biggest mistake they made was introducing the concept of God to explain the system commands. To humans, the existence of the divine is the most effective painkiller, with it humans can endure any kind of pain, and commit any kind of sins without guilt. With Kuniela’s deeds she established a Church and her own ‘divine’ authority she established herself as the ruler of UW. Kirito thought Kuniela had some decency left in her, or otherwise why add further restrictions in killing when the system forbid it? Cardinal explained it was because Kuniela didn’t want anyone else to reach the same power as she did, and killing humans is one of the fastest ways to gain exp.

Cardinal also refuted Kirito’s claims humans by nature are kind-hearted beings – UW citizens are only this way because of Rath’s meddling. The Goblins from Dark Territoty Kirito had met that had tried to kill him and Eugeo are also Fluctlights, given the opposite commands as the ones in UW; to kill, to forcibly take things, they are the product of fluctlights following the more basic human desires. Kirio had known something was off when he fought them, those weren’t like NPCs; their movements were too natural, they had sparks of life in their eyes. But he had never thought this might be the case. Kirito was tormented for a moment how he had killed another human (the Goblin captain), before Cardinal cut him off of his thoughts. He is not God, and there are some things that can’t be solved even after one or two hundred years of thought.

Cardinal thought of herself as a God once, and intervened in the world uncaring of what life actually is, following the laws of the world. It was only after obtaining a body that she started thinking about life. The world’s creators, Rath, probably have no idea what they have created and even then they are not omnipotent Gods. With the coming pressure experiments UW as it is now will become a living hell. Back to Kuniela, the Church’s laws was expanded (like do not feed sheep certain types of grass that will take away their ability to produce milk, or do not go into bogs that have poisonous gasses) and people lost their ability to think for themselves and relied on the Church for almost everything. They no longer question the authority of the Church. The main cathedral, first from a measly 3 floor high building eventually became higher and higher, like a symbol of her insatiable desires. Kuniela reached age 30, then 40, her body slowly being influenced by age. She left ruling UW to her minions and tried to research a way to extend her life, breaking the bounds of age. Her efforts produced no results however, and by the time she was over 60 her body was frail and her beauty was all gone. On her deathbed at age 80 she refused to give up however, and tried all kinds of combinations to find a way. Cardinal said Kuniela’s chances of success was smaller than throwing a thousand coins and expects them all to land heads up… but she succeeded. Even Cardinal was horrified at her obsession.

The command “System Call: Inspect Entire Command List” opened up an A4 sized window that basically gave her access to the root code of the world. Cardinal said this was another huge mistake Rath made, they should have eliminated this command after the four was logged out. At the bottom of the list was the command she needed, the emergency command that allows someone to take control of the world to restore balance – take control of all of the Cardinal System’s abilities and make yourself literally the God of the world. Kirito thought Rath really could not have kept this world under control; all of their personnel was basically in their thirties, and Kuniela had 80 years of life experience by then to find a way to break the system. Rath controlling the situation now was even less likely, with Kuniela having about another 300 years of experience.

Kirito’s worry was interrupted by Cardinal – she said it’s too early to start being afraid.
To build things up for later explanation, Cardinal explained how when the four humans was raising their kids there were other NPCs around them – after all, it’s strange for a world to only have two families. These were limited AIs, artificial Fluctlights without their own will.

Anyway, after Kuniela found this command she reset her age to 16 and removed the upper limit to her age. Kuniela was ecstatic to have recovered her youth and beauty, which Cardinal remarked no male would ever understand how happy she would have been. Kirito remarked that even he knew that’s the dream of all women, but Cardinal’s wasn’t convinced at his understanding. Cardinal remarked even she would have preferred an appearance maybe 5-6 years older than what she had right now…
Putting that aside, Cardinal continued on with her narration. Kuniela’s reasoning was affected by the joy of eternal youth and beauty, plus command over human territory. Cardinal seemed to be either laughing at human foolishness here, or maybe pitying it. Kuniela’s desire knows no bounds, and she could not accept another entity having the same authority as she did. Even if that entity is the Cardinal System, a program without its own will. Kuniela spent the night reading the instruction manual to use the full command list, but she only has a limited understanding of it because ultimately she’s a citizen of UW and not a scientifically-minded human. She tried to incorporate the Cardinal System into her own self, and she made her one and only mistake then. The motivation for the Cardinal System ended up overwriting her own desires within her own Fluctlight, and this was irreversible. Cardinal said it was a pity the Cardinal System’s driving motivation was not incompatible with Kuniela’s, as her Fluctlight would have broken apart under the paradox and solved a lot of problems right there. The motivation was ‘keep the current state as it is’ – as Kirito knew, if there was a good way to get rich very quickly or to power-level easily the Cardinal System would find it and correct it, for example by re-pricing items or making monsters harder to kill. Cardinal smirked at Kirito’s own complaints how once upon a time (ie, SAO) he and others tried to trick the Cardinal System but ended up failing. She has her own pride that no matter how many brats gather they can’t beat the system (ie, herself), this gave her a look more matching her 10-year old body that her old woman atmosphere earlier.

Due to Kuniela’s change, she wanted to keep things as it is so she used her new powers to make the walls separating the UW into quarters and declared the four most powerful nobles as Kings. This decreases human interaction and new ideas that can result from those, and things have stayed the same for 270 years after that. When before Kuniela had considered a reform to make things for the better for the commoners, now she no longer cares and strangles any signs of change. She placed similar symbols around UW to limit the pioneers’ expansion, such as boulders that can’t be broken, streams that can’t be crossed, trees that can’t be cut down etc. 50 years after Administrator took power nothing have changed and nobility has stagnated, and became even more worthless than before. 70 years after Kuniela became Administrator, she found she reached the limits of human memory – she lost memory of things that happened a few days before, occasionally when sleeping she loses consciousness, and she forgot some of the system commands from before. To address this Kuniela took in one of the Sisters-in-training that was in the cathedral and said she’ll make her the successor of UW. From the description the sister was only about 10 years old and with light brown hair, which Kirito deduced it’s talking about Cardinal in front of her. Kuniela attempted to overwrite the girl’s Fluctlight with her own, as a spare copy in case when she tries to fix herself by erasing some memories she breaks some part of her own soul. The same way people make back-up copies of important files before messing with them.

However, this was the second mistake Kuniela made; when her back-up copy was made and before she fixed herself, there was two Administrators in the same room with equal power. The Cardinal System split off, one is the main system that checks the entire game and the other became a subsystem to check the main system for bugs. Exactly like the SAO Cardinal system Kirito was familiar with. The second core system was the Cardinal which is in front of Kirito right now, finally free after being taken into Kuniela 70 years before she left. In a sense this Cardinal was a split personality of the original Kuniela given form. While Kirito stated in real life the existence of split personalities are debatable Cardinal said that was a good fit for what happened to them in UW. This Cardinal was operating when Kuniela’s desires was not that high at times, and when she was conscious she tried to correct the mistakes Kunela made. Cardinal attempted many suicides (jumping off the top of the cathedral (100 floors high) – 3 times. Stabbing self in the heart – 2 times. Using system command to burn herself alive – 2 times) to correct what Kuniela had accomplished. Even as the Administrator, if her health goes to zero she will still be destroyed. With literally the final drop of HP left Kuniela regained control of her body, so Cardinal could not finish the job.

To stop Cardinal killing her, Kuniela sealed away her own emotions and perfected the ‘Ritual of Synthesis’, basically cutting apart people’s fluctlights and stripping them of their personalities. The Synthesis Knights was basically the test subjects, in exchange for near-immortality and skills beyond mortals they are only puppets of Kuniela. Administrator is now like a machine, and only when Kuniela tried to make a back-up copy did Cardinal manage to free herself. After they saw each other when Kuniela finished operating on herself and deleting some memories, she failed to instantly eliminate Cardinal. Both of them felt fear that one of them is the exact same copy of themselves and they fought. Instinctive enmity and fear led them to fight, two Gods warring for three days and night upon the top of the cathedral. The original fluctlight in the 10 year old girl’s collapsed from the strain first, and that led to a fundamentally difference between Kuniela and Cardinal enough to make them seem different.

Kirito asked how the Administrator could break the taboo of killing another human, and Cardinal explained it’s a matter of perception. She demonstrated the rules of ‘teacup cannot directly touch the table, it needs a saucer underneaths it’ – even after so many years she could not bring herself to break that deeply ingrained rule from Kuniela’s childhood, but change the cup’s content from ‘tea’ to ‘soup’ she could put the cup down directly; it’s no longer a ‘tea’cup but a ‘soup’cup. Most people would not even be able to think about why they can’t put the teacup down directly, but people with high enough ‘hidden value’ of rule breaking tendencies could. The rapist that tried to kill Eugeo did something similar, he saw Eugeo as one of the Dark Territory residents in disguise and not a human, hence his ability to attempt to kill Eugeo. Cardinal mused if this inability to break rules was something Rath built into UW humans, and Kirito decided that’s impossible – they built the experiment in trying to break rules, not the other way around. (Flere821 note: They did find out by the end of this arc a US spy had written in some codes into UW that wasn’t part of Rath’s design, this was one of them)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flere821

Continued from above:

Spoiler for WEB Ch7 summary continued:

Before back on topic again, Kirito also asked for a helping of the corn soup Cardinal has. Cardinal snarked how Kirito really is a glutton before complying (Flere821 note: let’s see, the ‘hotdogs’ from Warmth of the Heart, his obsession with Asuna’s sandwich/food, the number of times he went off to buy snacks in UW before trotting back to a worried Eugeo… yeah, can’t argue with that ).
The final stages of the battle was Kuniela creating a zone of no system commands can be used, and spawned the most powerful weapon available in existence to physically fight. Seeing no choice Cardinal did the same and summoned her staff. Kuniela found one advantage she had; Kuniela had a 16 year old’s body, while Cardinal only had a 10 year old’s. Cardinal demonstrated this by standing up and taking off her robe, showing her small chest with white bra and her black shorts; her body doesn’t have the reach or strength (and the TL notes there’ll probably be this picture when the LN comes out, as there’s ALWAYS fanservice pics of some kind). Kirito noted similar things happened in SAO, where someone’s real life reach differes from other players’ and they had a disadvantage, or how in ALO their race’s trait (such as being large/small in size) is different to their real life body and they can’t get used to it.
The battle ended up as melee combat and Cardinal couldn’t physically match Kuniela, even though Cardinal made the first strike in system command attacks and Kuniela would have had her fluctlight destroyed the instant before her own one did. After three exchanges of strikes Cardinal lost. It was fortunate Kuniela sealed the use of system commands first before she sealed the room, otherwise Cardinal might not have escaped.
Cardinal spoke about the horror of being chased by Kuniela with her blade , feeling slashes onto her back. Kirito agreed that must have been horrifying, and Cardinal shot back Kirito needed to feel the same terror of a woman chasing after him with a weapon from all the womanizing he did within the last 2.5 years. Kirito fervently denied he did any such thing, then realised Cardinal has been stalking observing him for quite a while now.

Cardinal escaped, into one of two places even the Administrator cannot freely travel to. One is the Dark Territory, the other is the library of records they’re in right now. This library was created by the Administrator as a external storage space for her knowledge, and she made it impossible for others to access it. It takes a specific system command to access this place, and Cardinal used it before Kuniela did and locked the place up behind her. It’s easier to lock things up than to break it with system commands, and by the time Kuniela almost broke through the lock Cardinal made the library her’s and made the entrance disappear from the physical location in UW. The fact this library does not have a real physical location in UW to be broken into as part of the security played against Kuniela here. If they broke the walls all there will be is the void. Thus began Cardinal’s lonely experience for 200 years.

Kirito can’t even begin to understand how can someone live this long by herself, before remembering a human only have about 150 years of memory available to them; how does Cardinal here still function, then? Even with system commands Cardinal could not create something from nothing, so she can’t make a back-up just in case. The alternative, safer way she did was to erase all her memory as ‘Kuniela’, and 97% of the memory she had as Administrator, after putting them down onto paper (or some other physical records). She had no memory of her parents, how a bed feels like, and no emotion (Flere821 note: although later events – and how she snarked at Kirito before now - suggest she’s not as emotionless as she thinks). Cardinal sees herself solely as a program with the end goal of stopping Kuniela’s reign, no matter what she has to do.
(Flere821 note: I just noticed the narrative seems to suggest Kirito finds Cardinal beautiful whenever she acts like a kid her age rather than a weary old-timer, with words like ‘perfect smile’ and whatnot… goddamn it Kirito, another girl? You damn lolicon…)

Cardinal had tried to fight back within the last 200 years, but there’s a big difference between her and Kuniela – Kuniela has access to many minions and more resources. The Synthesis Knights can tip the scales towards Kuniela’s favour in a direct confrontation. These minions also help her govern the world, so she can lessen the intake of new memories. Now she rests on the top of the cathedral, reliving the memories of her past glory to further reduce additional information.

Kirito raised the point that that is indeed a advantage Kuniela has, but wouldn’t her minions betray her? From his experience in SAO there’s always conflict in large groups, the most notable example was how Divine Dragon’s Alliance ended up disbanded though Heathcliff’s KoB remained stable. (TL note: they look forward to if/when this eventually gets covered in Progressive). Cardinal said no betrayal is possible, due to ‘Ritual of Synthesis’ – they’re all puppets of the Adminstrator. The first Synthesis Knight was the legendary figure from back in Eugeo’s village, and Kirito thought this will be like him facing legendary figures from the past like Musashi. He tried to convince Cardinal this isn’t a shounen manga where after defeat they’ll somehow amazingly power-up, so there’s no way he can win. Cardinal gave him a look of “what the hell are you talking about?”. Of course this isn’t a manga, it’s a light novel =P

After many years the number of Synthesis Knights increased up to 50. Even taking into account border patrols and fighting against the Dark Territory, there will still be around 20 knights here in the Cathedral. Kirito thought it’s practically like he had just left the Town of Beginnings and the final boss dungeon is right in front of him.
Cardinal had been keeping a eye on Kirito, and a number of other people she might be able to recruit. Though most of the ones she found was taken by Kuniela and trained to be her minions, since Cardinal can only rely on her familiars while Kuniela can just open a window and see who has a high value of rule breaking tendencies. Cardinal revealed Charlotte, the familiar she stuck onto Kirito a while back and he never noticed. The winners of the tournaments are also inducted into a Synthesis Knight, the #30-50 are mostly such people. #1-20 are those with a high rule-breaking tendency values she captured. In a sense, Kirito was lucky they didn’t follow the original plan and win the tournament or they might have ended up as puppets.

After constant defeat Cardinal was thinking about giving up within the last 10 years. Kuniela steadily have gained influence while she herself have gained nothing, and have been losing hope. She questioned why it must be herself that corrects Kuniela’s mistakes, and started to yearn for the life she could have had as the 10 year old girl before she was erased; knowing nothing about the world, growing up, raising a family, and be surrounded by them on her deathbed. Originally it was on a whim Cardinal set her personality as a old woman, but now she felt more like one than ever. Rotting away with no future. Not even the Gods, Rath, has any interest in helping her even if they found this out. Kirito then knew Cardinal didn’t actually know about Rath, the real world, or have a connection to them, she figured all the truth of UW out with logic in the last 200 years.
Rath currently have been stepping up on the pressures to human society to try and see if it’ll force UW citizens to break the laws. Armies have started to amass in Dark Territory, and natural disasters have became more common. While the Dark Territory population is only half that of humans, there are vastly more combat-capable individuals in the goblins, beastmen and other races there. With how UW have stagnated and sword forms have been reduced to showmanship, UW will fall if Dark Territory invade. Administrator thinks she can defeat the Dark Territory with only her fifty Synthesis Knights, but Cardinal does not think it’s likely. Either way, the world will end, the only difference is if it’s by Kuniela’s deeds or that of the Dark Territory as they pillage and burn across human lands. 50 knights can’t hold ground, and even Kuniela will be defeated by the thousands of system command users within Dark Territory.

Cardinal knew there is no way out once Rath starts their pressure phase, so she wants to mercy-kill the entire UW, including the Dark Territory. While spending the next several hundred years to incorporate humanity with the other races is the best solution, it is not a possible one from what she has seen. Even if they stop Kuniela they can’t escape from Rath. It’s a military experiment after all, if UW tries to disobey they will just delete the whole thing and start anew. Cardinal likened this to fishes bred for consumption choosing to die by the hands of the fishermen or flop onto land and suffocate through their own actions. Cardinal offers Kirito her help to return back to the real world, if she became Administrator she can do so. In addition, she can use what little power she have to save ten Fluctlights and let them live on in the real world with Kirito. Ten of them is about the number Kirito can feasibly sneak out of Rath anyway, though Kirito doesn’t think he can choose between the ones he has met since coming into UW – and does he have the right to decide who gets to live solely because they have met him?

Cardinal went through how she found out about Kirito and Eugeo, when they cut down a tree that was supposedly to be impossible. Through Charlotte Cardinal found the reasons they got this powerful and how they cut the tree down. After Cardinal saw Kirito did things no UW citizen (little things, like feeding stray dogs) can do she knew Kirito isn’t bound by the laws of the world – if anyone else found that Kirito would have been instantly captured by the Church. And since Kirito isn’t from UW, his soul is in the STL and beyond the reach of the Administrator, so he is the best chance that can fight against the Administrator without being instantly deleted.

Kirito asked why didn’t Cardinal leave all this behind, start a new life and family, instead of spending 200 years in a library by herself? As part of Kuniela her blood from nobility should have been enough to break any bounds left on her by the laws. Cardinal replied as the subsystem her only desire is to stop Kuniela… before she remembered her one other desire. She told Kirito to get up, position his arms in a circle, and after much tsundere actions incoherent orders Kirito found himself hugging Cardinal, with her on a stool so her head is level with Kirito’s. Human contact, after 200 years, and Cardinal thought this as worth all the efforts she had put in so far with a few tears shed. Loneliness and dedication towards a goal will eventually dry up a person’s mind and soul, which needs to be sated by human interactions. Kirito was reminded of his time back in SAO where he dedicated himself to one goal no matter what (training to get that revive crystal) and felt he can sympathize with what Cardinal has went through.
After who-knows-how-long, Cardinal broke off and went back to being a enlightened sage, asking if Kirito is willing to help her. Kirito said yes, though he said he will also be looking for the third option that doesn’t involve everyone dying. Cardinal acknowledged that Kirito’s a hopeless idealist, but that’s within her tolerance. Kirito added he doesn’t want to see Cardinal die – if he had to choose ten people to leave with him, he’ll choose her as one of the ten. (Flere821 & TL Note: Another addition into his harem ^^; xD)
Cardinal’s eyes widened at his claim (Flere821: haremette ‘loli #2’ confirmed as obtained), before giving a sad laugh saying Kirito’s not just a idealist, but also a fool; even if she wants to leave she can’t, she’s part of this world and if she’s gone there’s no-one left to destroy it for the mercy-kill. Kirito says he understand that, but he’s also not giving up. Cardinal said one day he will understand the meaning of despair and giving up; but enough of that, time to go look for Eugeo and plan out their next moves.

Eugeo had finished reading, and asked what’s the time – they lost track of it. Cardinal said it’s been three hours, the sun’s up and it’s about 8am in the morning. Kirito gave a brief explanation on who Cardinal is/was (nothing that will break Eugeo’s mind), such as Cardinal used to be the High Priest and she’s helping them to take down Administrator. Eugeo asked if Cardinal knew anything about Alice; is the Alice from his village the same as Alice Synthesis Fifty? Cardinal said she’s been spending all her attention on him and Kirito, so she doesn’t know – though she says she knows how to remove the brainwashing Administrator had done to the knights. The memory circuit of the knights are sealed, someone they love have been erased from their mind and using that as basis of the change. This was shown when Kirito and Eugeo accidently influenced the brainwashing of Synthesis Twenty-Six they fought when they tried to escape. The memory fragment is the key to return them back to normal. If they want to get that they’ll have to reach the top of the cathedral, since the Administrator is likely to keep those fragments in her own room. Kirito wanted to stop the knights non-violently but Cardinal derided that as futile – all she can do is raise their equipment onto the same level as the Synthesis Knights, not to the point where they can afford to go easy on their opponents. It’s either slaughter a way to victory or die. Kirito asked is she not coming with them, and Cardinal says if she shows up it’ll instantly be the final battle – she’ll gladly go with them if they think they can stop 20 Synthesis Knights at once. Administrator right now still wants to brainwash Kirito and Eugeo, so she’ll be sending her knights after them in 2s and 3s to capture them alive. This way Kirito and Eugeo will still have a chance to victory.

Eugeo said he’s fine with fighting, even killing his opponents, however he can’t fight Alice as that’ll completely deny what he has accomplished within the last 2 years. Cardinal handed him and Kirito each a small dagger that weighed as much as a real sword, saying if that’s the case use these as their trump card; these daggers have no attacking power whatsoever, but if stabbed into their enemy it will have a path established with Cardinal and she can use her spells to take them down. Use it on Alice and she’ll instantly be asleep, and stay that way until they recover her memory fragment. As even system commands can’t create something out of nothing, those daggers are built upon her own sacrifice; a hundred years’ worth of hair. Cardinal joked if Kirito and Eugeo had shown up a month earlier they would be able to see her long hair that was her pride then. Kirito found even Cardinal has some similarities with normal girls in that she has pride in her hair and she felt sad she had to cut it off. These daggers were originally made to use against the Administrator, so make sure when they use it it counts. Eugeo asks if it’s alright for him to use something there’s only two of in the world, and Cardinal says it’s fine. She almost let slip they will all die anyway so it doesn’t matter. Kirito inwardly vowed to include Eugeo, Alice, and Cardinal among the ten he can save, even if he has to trick Cardinal into coming with him. He then shamefully realised that meant he in a way agreed to Cardinal’s solution, but he resolved he’ll save them even at the cost of this world.

Kirito then raised the point if system commands can’t make something out of nothing, then where did the food they ate came from? Cardinal smiled and said all she did was use some worthless history books as raw material. Eugeo, as the history fanatic, choked at this revelation and said no they don’t need any more food when Cardinal offered to make some more.
Kirito had thought they’d get the best gear in-game before remembering Cardinal can’t make something out of nothing. Cardinal started to think if she had chosen the right person after Kirito found out he won’t be getting the stuff he thought he’d get. She then explained even without her they’d still have the best gear anyway, one is a sword belonging to one of 4 dragon knights, the other was made from material of a tree that had absorbed resources from a large area for the past several hundred years. Add to the fact they know how to use these powerful weapons they should be fine. Kirito was reminded of fools in SAO that got some rare drops and then went to test them out, but then their inexperience killed them when the NPCs attacked.

Kirito and Eugeo’s swords are at level 3. Their final destination is at level 100. Kirito had thought this will be a long quest and asked if they can start at level 50 instead, but Eugeo reminded them they wanted to keep the opponent separate. More space to cover means less likely to find the knights all in one place. Cardinal then reminded them of one more thing, that Synthesis Knights have abilities with their weapons that make them a extension of their body and have other special effects. Cardinal gave them 3 hours to write up a code/spell that will unlock their own weapon’s abilities (Kirito’s is a branch, Eugeo’s sword at the very basis is ice that can never melt). The harsh time constraints was because it has almost been 24 hours since they lost their swords, any longer they will lose ownership over it.

Three hours later, Kirito and Eugeo got some sort of code working (though Cardinal said those were really inefficient code) and Cardinal dropped them off close to the room where they have their swords. Cardinal left the world’s fate in their hands and let them decide whether the world will bathe in hellfire, fall into the void, or *looks at Kirito* there may be some third option. They left the room, and started their mission.

Before back on topic again, Kirito also asked for a helping of the corn soup Cardinal has. Cardinal snarked how Kirito really is a glutton before complying (Flere821 note: let’s see, the ‘hotdogs’ from Warmth of the Heart, his obsession with Asuna’s sandwich/food, the number of times he went off to buy snacks in UW before trotting back to a worried Eugeo… yeah, can’t argue with that ).
The final stages of the battle was Kuniela creating a zone of no system commands can be used, and spawned the most powerful weapon available in existence to physically fight. Seeing no choice Cardinal did the same and summoned her staff. Kuniela found one advantage she had; Kuniela had a 16 year old’s body, while Cardinal only had a 10 year old’s. Cardinal demonstrated this by standing up and taking off her robe, showing her small chest with white bra and her black shorts; her body doesn’t have the reach or strength (and the TL notes there’ll probably be this picture when the LN comes out, as there’s ALWAYS fanservice pics of some kind). Kirito noted similar things happened in SAO, where someone’s real life reach differes from other players’ and they had a disadvantage, or how in ALO their race’s trait (such as being large/small in size) is different to their real life body and they can’t get used to it.
The battle ended up as melee combat and Cardinal couldn’t physically match Kuniela, even though Cardinal made the first strike in system command attacks and Kuniela would have had her fluctlight destroyed the instant before her own one did. After three exchanges of strikes Cardinal lost. It was fortunate Kuniela sealed the use of system commands first before she sealed the room, otherwise Cardinal might not have escaped.
Cardinal spoke about the horror of being chased by Kuniela with her blade , feeling slashes onto her back. Kirito agreed that must have been horrifying, and Cardinal shot back Kirito needed to feel the same terror of a woman chasing after him with a weapon from all the womanizing he did within the last 2.5 years. Kirito fervently denied he did any such thing, then realised Cardinal has been stalking observing him for quite a while now.

Cardinal escaped, into one of two places even the Administrator cannot freely travel to. One is the Dark Territory, the other is the library of records they’re in right now. This library was created by the Administrator as a external storage space for her knowledge, and she made it impossible for others to access it. It takes a specific system command to access this place, and Cardinal used it before Kuniela did and locked the place up behind her. It’s easier to lock things up than to break it with system commands, and by the time Kuniela almost broke through the lock Cardinal made the library her’s and made the entrance disappear from the physical location in UW. The fact this library does not have a real physical location in UW to be broken into as part of the security played against Kuniela here. If they broke the walls all there will be is the void. Thus began Cardinal’s lonely experience for 200 years.

Kirito can’t even begin to understand how can someone live this long by herself, before remembering a human only have about 150 years of memory available to them; how does Cardinal here still function, then? Even with system commands Cardinal could not create something from nothing, so she can’t make a back-up just in case. The alternative, safer way she did was to erase all her memory as ‘Kuniela’, and 97% of the memory she had as Administrator, after putting them down onto paper (or some other physical records). She had no memory of her parents, how a bed feels like, and no emotion (Flere821 note: although later events – and how she snarked at Kirito before now - suggest she’s not as emotionless as she thinks). Cardinal sees herself solely as a program with the end goal of stopping Kuniela’s reign, no matter what she has to do.
(Flere821 note: I just noticed the narrative seems to suggest Kirito finds Cardinal beautiful whenever she acts like a kid her age rather than a weary old-timer, with words like ‘perfect smile’ and whatnot… goddamn it Kirito, another girl? You damn lolicon…)

Cardinal had tried to fight back within the last 200 years, but there’s a big difference between her and Kuniela – Kuniela has access to many minions and more resources. The Synthesis Knights can tip the scales towards Kuniela’s favour in a direct confrontation. These minions also help her govern the world, so she can lessen the intake of new memories. Now she rests on the top of the cathedral, reliving the memories of her past glory to further reduce additional information.

Kirito raised the point that that is indeed a advantage Kuniela has, but wouldn’t her minions betray her? From his experience in SAO there’s always conflict in large groups, the most notable example was how Divine Dragon’s Alliance ended up disbanded though Heathcliff’s KoB remained stable. (TL note: they look forward to if/when this eventually gets covered in Progressive). Cardinal said no betrayal is possible, due to ‘Ritual of Synthesis’ – they’re all puppets of the Adminstrator. The first Synthesis Knight was the legendary figure from back in Eugeo’s village, and Kirito thought this will be like him facing legendary figures from the past like Musashi. He tried to convince Cardinal this isn’t a shounen manga where after defeat they’ll somehow amazingly power-up, so there’s no way he can win. Cardinal gave him a look of “what the hell are you talking about?”. Of course this isn’t a manga, it’s a light novel =P

After many years the number of Synthesis Knights increased up to 50. Even taking into account border patrols and fighting against the Dark Territory, there will still be around 20 knights here in the Cathedral. Kirito thought it’s practically like he had just left the Town of Beginnings and the final boss dungeon is right in front of him.
Cardinal had been keeping a eye on Kirito, and a number of other people she might be able to recruit. Though most of the ones she found was taken by Kuniela and trained to be her minions, since Cardinal can only rely on her familiars while Kuniela can just open a window and see who has a high value of rule breaking tendencies. Cardinal revealed Charlotte, the familiar she stuck onto Kirito a while back and he never noticed. The winners of the tournaments are also inducted into a Synthesis Knight, the #30-50 are mostly such people. #1-20 are those with a high rule-breaking tendency values she captured. In a sense, Kirito was lucky they didn’t follow the original plan and win the tournament or they might have ended up as puppets.

After constant defeat Cardinal was thinking about giving up within the last 10 years. Kuniela steadily have gained influence while she herself have gained nothing, and have been losing hope. She questioned why it must be herself that corrects Kuniela’s mistakes, and started to yearn for the life she could have had as the 10 year old girl before she was erased; knowing nothing about the world, growing up, raising a family, and be surrounded by them on her deathbed. Originally it was on a whim Cardinal set her personality as a old woman, but now she felt more like one than ever. Rotting away with no future. Not even the Gods, Rath, has any interest in helping her even if they found this out. Kirito then knew Cardinal didn’t actually know about Rath, the real world, or have a connection to them, she figured all the truth of UW out with logic in the last 200 years.
Rath currently have been stepping up on the pressures to human society to try and see if it’ll force UW citizens to break the laws. Armies have started to amass in Dark Territory, and natural disasters have became more common. While the Dark Territory population is only half that of humans, there are vastly more combat-capable individuals in the goblins, beastmen and other races there. With how UW have stagnated and sword forms have been reduced to showmanship, UW will fall if Dark Territory invade. Administrator thinks she can defeat the Dark Territory with only her fifty Synthesis Knights, but Cardinal does not think it’s likely. Either way, the world will end, the only difference is if it’s by Kuniela’s deeds or that of the Dark Territory as they pillage and burn across human lands. 50 knights can’t hold ground, and even Kuniela will be defeated by the thousands of system command users within Dark Territory.

Cardinal knew there is no way out once Rath starts their pressure phase, so she wants to mercy-kill the entire UW, including the Dark Territory. While spending the next several hundred years to incorporate humanity with the other races is the best solution, it is not a possible one from what she has seen. Even if they stop Kuniela they can’t escape from Rath. It’s a military experiment after all, if UW tries to disobey they will just delete the whole thing and start anew. Cardinal likened this to fishes bred for consumption choosing to die by the hands of the fishermen or flop onto land and suffocate through their own actions. Cardinal offers Kirito her help to return back to the real world, if she became Administrator she can do so. In addition, she can use what little power she have to save ten Fluctlights and let them live on in the real world with Kirito. Ten of them is about the number Kirito can feasibly sneak out of Rath anyway, though Kirito doesn’t think he can choose between the ones he has met since coming into UW – and does he have the right to decide who gets to live solely because they have met him?

Cardinal went through how she found out about Kirito and Eugeo, when they cut down a tree that was supposedly to be impossible. Through Charlotte Cardinal found the reasons they got this powerful and how they cut the tree down. After Cardinal saw Kirito did things no UW citizen (little things, like feeding stray dogs) can do she knew Kirito isn’t bound by the laws of the world – if anyone else found that Kirito would have been instantly captured by the Church. And since Kirito isn’t from UW, his soul is in the STL and beyond the reach of the Administrator, so he is the best chance that can fight against the Administrator without being instantly deleted.

Kirito asked why didn’t Cardinal leave all this behind, start a new life and family, instead of spending 200 years in a library by herself? As part of Kuniela her blood from nobility should have been enough to break any bounds left on her by the laws. Cardinal replied as the subsystem her only desire is to stop Kuniela… before she remembered her one other desire. She told Kirito to get up, position his arms in a circle, and after much tsundere actions incoherent orders Kirito found himself hugging Cardinal, with her on a stool so her head is level with Kirito’s. Human contact, after 200 years, and Cardinal thought this as worth all the efforts she had put in so far with a few tears shed. Loneliness and dedication towards a goal will eventually dry up a person’s mind and soul, which needs to be sated by human interactions. Kirito was reminded of his time back in SAO where he dedicated himself to one goal no matter what (training to get that revive crystal) and felt he can sympathize with what Cardinal has went through.
After who-knows-how-long, Cardinal broke off and went back to being a enlightened sage, asking if Kirito is willing to help her. Kirito said yes, though he said he will also be looking for the third option that doesn’t involve everyone dying. Cardinal acknowledged that Kirito’s a hopeless idealist, but that’s within her tolerance. Kirito added he doesn’t want to see Cardinal die – if he had to choose ten people to leave with him, he’ll choose her as one of the ten. (Flere821 & TL Note: Another addition into his harem ^^; xD)
Cardinal’s eyes widened at his claim (Flere821: haremette ‘loli #2’ confirmed as obtained), before giving a sad laugh saying Kirito’s not just a idealist, but also a fool; even if she wants to leave she can’t, she’s part of this world and if she’s gone there’s no-one left to destroy it for the mercy-kill. Kirito says he understand that, but he’s also not giving up. Cardinal said one day he will understand the meaning of despair and giving up; but enough of that, time to go look for Eugeo and plan out their next moves.

Eugeo had finished reading, and asked what’s the time – they lost track of it. Cardinal said it’s been three hours, the sun’s up and it’s about 8am in the morning. Kirito gave a brief explanation on who Cardinal is/was (nothing that will break Eugeo’s mind), such as Cardinal used to be the High Priest and she’s helping them to take down Administrator. Eugeo asked if Cardinal knew anything about Alice; is the Alice from his village the same as Alice Synthesis Fifty? Cardinal said she’s been spending all her attention on him and Kirito, so she doesn’t know – though she says she knows how to remove the brainwashing Administrator had done to the knights. The memory circuit of the knights are sealed, someone they love have been erased from their mind and using that as basis of the change. This was shown when Kirito and Eugeo accidently influenced the brainwashing of Synthesis Twenty-Six they fought when they tried to escape. The memory fragment is the key to return them back to normal. If they want to get that they’ll have to reach the top of the cathedral, since the Administrator is likely to keep those fragments in her own room. Kirito wanted to stop the knights non-violently but Cardinal derided that as futile – all she can do is raise their equipment onto the same level as the Synthesis Knights, not to the point where they can afford to go easy on their opponents. It’s either slaughter a way to victory or die. Kirito asked is she not coming with them, and Cardinal says if she shows up it’ll instantly be the final battle – she’ll gladly go with them if they think they can stop 20 Synthesis Knights at once. Administrator right now still wants to brainwash Kirito and Eugeo, so she’ll be sending her knights after them in 2s and 3s to capture them alive. This way Kirito and Eugeo will still have a chance to victory.

Eugeo said he’s fine with fighting, even killing his opponents, however he can’t fight Alice as that’ll completely deny what he has accomplished within the last 2 years. Cardinal handed him and Kirito each a small dagger that weighed as much as a real sword, saying if that’s the case use these as their trump card; these daggers have no attacking power whatsoever, but if stabbed into their enemy it will have a path established with Cardinal and she can use her spells to take them down. Use it on Alice and she’ll instantly be asleep, and stay that way until they recover her memory fragment. As even system commands can’t create something out of nothing, those daggers are built upon her own sacrifice; a hundred years’ worth of hair. Cardinal joked if Kirito and Eugeo had shown up a month earlier they would be able to see her long hair that was her pride then. Kirito found even Cardinal has some similarities with normal girls in that she has pride in her hair and she felt sad she had to cut it off. These daggers were originally made to use against the Administrator, so make sure when they use it it counts. Eugeo asks if it’s alright for him to use something there’s only two of in the world, and Cardinal says it’s fine. She almost let slip they will all die anyway so it doesn’t matter. Kirito inwardly vowed to include Eugeo, Alice, and Cardinal among the ten he can save, even if he has to trick Cardinal into coming with him. He then shamefully realised that meant he in a way agreed to Cardinal’s solution, but he resolved he’ll save them even at the cost of this world.

Kirito then raised the point if system commands can’t make something out of nothing, then where did the food they ate came from? Cardinal smiled and said all she did was use some worthless history books as raw material. Eugeo, as the history fanatic, choked at this revelation and said no they don’t need any more food when Cardinal offered to make some more.
Kirito had thought they’d get the best gear in-game before remembering Cardinal can’t make something out of nothing. Cardinal started to think if she had chosen the right person after Kirito found out he won’t be getting the stuff he thought he’d get. She then explained even without her they’d still have the best gear anyway, one is a sword belonging to one of 4 dragon knights, the other was made from material of a tree that had absorbed resources from a large area for the past several hundred years. Add to the fact they know how to use these powerful weapons they should be fine. Kirito was reminded of fools in SAO that got some rare drops and then went to test them out, but then their inexperience killed them when the NPCs attacked.

Kirito and Eugeo’s swords are at level 3. Their final destination is at level 100. Kirito had thought this will be a long quest and asked if they can start at level 50 instead, but Eugeo reminded them they wanted to keep the opponent separate. More space to cover means less likely to find the knights all in one place. Cardinal then reminded them of one more thing, that Synthesis Knights have abilities with their weapons that make them a extension of their body and have other special effects. Cardinal gave them 3 hours to write up a code/spell that will unlock their own weapon’s abilities (Kirito’s is a branch, Eugeo’s sword at the very basis is ice that can never melt). The harsh time constraints was because it has almost been 24 hours since they lost their swords, any longer they will lose ownership over it.

Three hours later, Kirito and Eugeo got some sort of code working (though Cardinal said those were really inefficient code) and Cardinal dropped them off close to the room where they have their swords. Cardinal left the world’s fate in their hands and let them decide whether the world will bathe in hellfire, fall into the void, or *looks at Kirito* there may be some third option. They left the room, and started their mission.

Great summaries from Flere821. Although the summaries were very long that they didn't look like summaries at all but the first 2 parts of Chapter 7 are really that long, about 200+ pages of a light novel. As a slow reader, it already took 2 hours for me only to finish up the escape part. I wonder I may have to take half a day to finish the remaining section.

man thank you very much really!!!!
so alice became brainwashed huh hunf poor her...
i hope kirito finds the third option btw
and hell cardinal as a harem girl? really? (i almost died laughing about this)

Chinese translations on WEB Ch7 is about half done, this part is a lot longer than previous parts. Here’s a summary of it (will be continued in my next post):

Spoiler for Ch7 1st half:

This chapter really shows how bad it can get when humans try to pose as gods. Intellectually we readers understood UW was created as an experiment, but it's another to see the place designed for bloodshed and the recreation of pillage and war first hand emotionally through the narrative.

Kirito and Eugeo was captured by Alice before, they escaped the dungeons, and before they got hunted down they were rescued by a girl that looked around 10 years old with light brown hair but talked like a old woman (more precisely, a old woman using old English, with her words in English approximately using words like ‘Thou’ and so on). Using ‘magic’ Eugeo and Kirito was taken into a library that housed the records of everything in UW since its creation, the coding for the world and the System Command lists. The girl revealed herself to be named ‘Cardinal’ (as in, from the Cardinal System – explanation will come up later). As Kirito understood it the Cardinal System does not have a anthropomorphic avatar of sorts, even in games like ALO and GGO. Kirito and Eugeo was given food to heal all their wounds taken from escaping, and Eugeo asked where the history section of UW is, and Cardinal pointed him to the ‘Corridor of History’. After Eugeo left Cardinal sighed and said the history of the world and those records are only fakes written by the priests, and Kirito took the chance to clarify some things (Flere821 note: go make a sandwich, grab a drink or something, this is going to take a while to explain).

The three gods as UW know it does not exist, only as accounts with more abilities than others – and those accounts have never logged into UW even once before now. Cardinal confirmed this world is made by Rath, and she’s a offshoot of the Cardinal System designed by Kayaba. Cardinal was surprised Kirito knew about Kayaba, and found how Kirito knew other versions of the Cardinal interesting.

Cardinal went through how Feudalism came to be set up in UW – the developers didn’t put that in themselves. Cardinal doesn’t have the means to talk to the ‘Real World’, that is something only the Adminstrator of UW have. Because of certain events (will be explained later) Cardinal has lost a lot of her abilities, and unlike the other Cardinal systems Kirito knew she’s not omniscient within the setting. Back to the topic of Feudalism, of the four humans that took care of the first Fluctlights one of them was not the morally upright person Rath thought he was. It may have been unintentional, but his ambition, desire to satisfy his own wants, and desire to control others – basically the darker side of human nature – have infected two of the 8 fluctlights. (As an aside, Cardinal cannot access the names of the four people; so Kirito couldn’t be forewarned by who within Rath might be a traitor or intending to harm him). These negative traits was bred out if people married lower class nobles or commoners, but for those that maintained blood purity of ‘nobility’ there was a much higher chance of inheriting these negative traits (like the scheming rapists from previous chapter). The current Pope is the one that led to Feudalism being installed, and she had taken the name ‘Adminstrator’. (Kirito was surprised that the Pope was a ‘she’ – to him Popes are normally wizened old men with plenty of life experience). In a sense, the Adminstrator was Cardinal’s mother (more on that later).

Feudalism was installed 350 years ago, 100 years after the experiment started. At the time UW citizens are married around 20, and each family have on average 5 children. By 5th generation the population of UW is around 500 people (marriage and birth mechanics will be skipped here, it’s a aside to the plot).
From these people, the ones with domination desires took the land of people around them and became leaders, and made people who lost their land servants. Those that disagreed with them went to pioneer other settlements near the outer edge. There was hostility between the various leaders, and there is very little marriage between them. This all changed when from one of these few political marriages a girl named Kuniela (Note: I’m bad with names, so this might not be the correct spelling) was born. She had the strongest negative desires of people being born ever at that time. She was amazingly talented, in multiple areas such as sword skill, system commands, singing, sewing etc. She could have excelled in any lifelong career she was assigned to, but her father that was in charge of giving them wanted to keep her close by and gave her the career of practicing system commands (ie, like a priest). Kuniela figured out system commands aren’t meaningless words, but of a different language, and eventually figured out a spell to launch fire arrows.

She then took advantage of the ‘exp system’ of UW, by defeating other creatures in UW you can gain exp in the ‘System Access Authority’ of UW. Most people are kind-natured, and do not like to harm animals without reason, but the tainted nobility was the exceptions. At age 11 Kuniela went on nightly hunting trips killing foxes and other animals, and to keep the balance the Cardinal (before she had a sense of self) replenished the surroundings as per the system. Kirito understood the idea, he went level grinding himself back in SAO, but for some reason he felt horrified at what Kuniela has done. It’s like something from a nightmare, a small girl dressed in her pyjamas and unflinchingly burning anything she came across at night. Kuniela’s level increased steadily, along with her understanding of system commands. She eventually mastered healing and weather forecasting, and along with her beauty by age 13 she seemed like an angel or divine descent.

Cardinal said Rath the biggest mistake they made was introducing the concept of God to explain the system commands. To humans, the existence of the divine is the most effective painkiller, with it humans can endure any kind of pain, and commit any kind of sins without guilt. With Kuniela’s deeds she established a Church and her own ‘divine’ authority she established herself as the ruler of UW. Kirito thought Kuniela had some decency left in her, or otherwise why add further restrictions in killing when the system forbid it? Cardinal explained it was because Kuniela didn’t want anyone else to reach the same power as she did, and killing humans is one of the fastest ways to gain exp.

Cardinal also refuted Kirito’s claims humans by nature are kind-hearted beings – UW citizens are only this way because of Rath’s meddling. The Goblins from Dark Territoty Kirito had met that had tried to kill him and Eugeo are also Fluctlights, given the opposite commands as the ones in UW; to kill, to forcibly take things, they are the product of fluctlights following the more basic human desires. Kirio had known something was off when he fought them, those weren’t like NPCs; their movements were too natural, they had sparks of life in their eyes. But he had never thought this might be the case. Kirito was tormented for a moment how he had killed another human (the Goblin captain), before Cardinal cut him off of his thoughts. He is not God, and there are some things that can’t be solved even after one or two hundred years of thought.

Cardinal thought of herself as a God once, and intervened in the world uncaring of what life actually is, following the laws of the world. It was only after obtaining a body that she started thinking about life. The world’s creators, Rath, probably have no idea what they have created and even then they are not omnipotent Gods. With the coming pressure experiments UW as it is now will become a living hell. Back to Kuniela, the Church’s laws was expanded (like do not feed sheep certain types of grass that will take away their ability to produce milk, or do not go into bogs that have poisonous gasses) and people lost their ability to think for themselves and relied on the Church for almost everything. They no longer question the authority of the Church. The main cathedral, first from a measly 3 floor high building eventually became higher and higher, like a symbol of her insatiable desires. Kuniela reached age 30, then 40, her body slowly being influenced by age. She left ruling UW to her minions and tried to research a way to extend her life, breaking the bounds of age. Her efforts produced no results however, and by the time she was over 60 her body was frail and her beauty was all gone. On her deathbed at age 80 she refused to give up however, and tried all kinds of combinations to find a way. Cardinal said Kuniela’s chances of success was smaller than throwing a thousand coins and expects them all to land heads up… but she succeeded. Even Cardinal was horrified at her obsession.

The command “System Call: Inspect Entire Command List” opened up an A4 sized window that basically gave her access to the root code of the world. Cardinal said this was another huge mistake Rath made, they should have eliminated this command after the four was logged out. At the bottom of the list was the command she needed, the emergency command that allows someone to take control of the world to restore balance – take control of all of the Cardinal System’s abilities and make yourself literally the God of the world. Kirito thought Rath really could not have kept this world under control; all of their personnel was basically in their thirties, and Kuniela had 80 years of life experience by then to find a way to break the system. Rath controlling the situation now was even less likely, with Kuniela having about another 300 years of experience.

Kirito’s worry was interrupted by Cardinal – she said it’s too early to start being afraid.
To build things up for later explanation, Cardinal explained how when the four humans was raising their kids there were other NPCs around them – after all, it’s strange for a world to only have two families. These were limited AIs, artificial Fluctlights without their own will.

Anyway, after Kuniela found this command she reset her age to 16 and removed the upper limit to her age. Kuniela was ecstatic to have recovered her youth and beauty, which Cardinal remarked no male would ever understand how happy she would have been. Kirito remarked that even he knew that’s the dream of all women, but Cardinal’s wasn’t convinced at his understanding. Cardinal remarked even she would have preferred an appearance maybe 5-6 years older than what she had right now…
Putting that aside, Cardinal continued on with her narration. Kuniela’s reasoning was affected by the joy of eternal youth and beauty, plus command over human territory. Cardinal seemed to be either laughing at human foolishness here, or maybe pitying it. Kuniela’s desire knows no bounds, and she could not accept another entity having the same authority as she did. Even if that entity is the Cardinal System, a program without its own will. Kuniela spent the night reading the instruction manual to use the full command list, but she only has a limited understanding of it because ultimately she’s a citizen of UW and not a scientifically-minded human. She tried to incorporate the Cardinal System into her own self, and she made her one and only mistake then. The motivation for the Cardinal System ended up overwriting her own desires within her own Fluctlight, and this was irreversible. Cardinal said it was a pity the Cardinal System’s driving motivation was not incompatible with Kuniela’s, as her Fluctlight would have broken apart under the paradox and solved a lot of problems right there. The motivation was ‘keep the current state as it is’ – as Kirito knew, if there was a good way to get rich very quickly or to power-level easily the Cardinal System would find it and correct it, for example by re-pricing items or making monsters harder to kill. Cardinal smirked at Kirito’s own complaints how once upon a time (ie, SAO) he and others tried to trick the Cardinal System but ended up failing. She has her own pride that no matter how many brats gather they can’t beat the system (ie, herself), this gave her a look more matching her 10-year old body that her old woman atmosphere earlier.

Due to Kuniela’s change, she wanted to keep things as it is so she used her new powers to make the walls separating the UW into quarters and declared the four most powerful nobles as Kings. This decreases human interaction and new ideas that can result from those, and things have stayed the same for 270 years after that. When before Kuniela had considered a reform to make things for the better for the commoners, now she no longer cares and strangles any signs of change. She placed similar symbols around UW to limit the pioneers’ expansion, such as boulders that can’t be broken, streams that can’t be crossed, trees that can’t be cut down etc. 50 years after Administrator took power nothing have changed and nobility has stagnated, and became even more worthless than before. 70 years after Kuniela became Administrator, she found she reached the limits of human memory – she lost memory of things that happened a few days before, occasionally when sleeping she loses consciousness, and she forgot some of the system commands from before. To address this Kuniela took in one of the Sisters-in-training that was in the cathedral and said she’ll make her the successor of UW. From the description the sister was only about 10 years old and with light brown hair, which Kirito deduced it’s talking about Cardinal in front of her. Kuniela attempted to overwrite the girl’s Fluctlight with her own, as a spare copy in case when she tries to fix herself by erasing some memories she breaks some part of her own soul. The same way people make back-up copies of important files before messing with them.

However, this was the second mistake Kuniela made; when her back-up copy was made and before she fixed herself, there was two Administrators in the same room with equal power. The Cardinal System split off, one is the main system that checks the entire game and the other became a subsystem to check the main system for bugs. Exactly like the SAO Cardinal system Kirito was familiar with. The second core system was the Cardinal which is in front of Kirito right now, finally free after being taken into Kuniela 70 years before she left. In a sense this Cardinal was a split personality of the original Kuniela given form. While Kirito stated in real life the existence of split personalities are debatable Cardinal said that was a good fit for what happened to them in UW. This Cardinal was operating when Kuniela’s desires was not that high at times, and when she was conscious she tried to correct the mistakes Kunela made. Cardinal attempted many suicides (jumping off the top of the cathedral (100 floors high) – 3 times. Stabbing self in the heart – 2 times. Using system command to burn herself alive – 2 times) to correct what Kuniela had accomplished. Even as the Administrator, if her health goes to zero she will still be destroyed. With literally the final drop of HP left Kuniela regained control of her body, so Cardinal could not finish the job.

To stop Cardinal killing her, Kuniela sealed away her own emotions and perfected the ‘Ritual of Synthesis’, basically cutting apart people’s fluctlights and stripping them of their personalities. The Synthesis Knights was basically the test subjects, in exchange for near-immortality and skills beyond mortals they are only puppets of Kuniela. Administrator is now like a machine, and only when Kuniela tried to make a back-up copy did Cardinal manage to free herself. After they saw each other when Kuniela finished operating on herself and deleting some memories, she failed to instantly eliminate Cardinal. Both of them felt fear that one of them is the exact same copy of themselves and they fought. Instinctive enmity and fear led them to fight, two Gods warring for three days and night upon the top of the cathedral. The original fluctlight in the 10 year old girl’s collapsed from the strain first, and that led to a fundamentally difference between Kuniela and Cardinal enough to make them seem different.

Kirito asked how the Administrator could break the taboo of killing another human, and Cardinal explained it’s a matter of perception. She demonstrated the rules of ‘teacup cannot directly touch the table, it needs a saucer underneaths it’ – even after so many years she could not bring herself to break that deeply ingrained rule from Kuniela’s childhood, but change the cup’s content from ‘tea’ to ‘soup’ she could put the cup down directly; it’s no longer a ‘tea’cup but a ‘soup’cup. Most people would not even be able to think about why they can’t put the teacup down directly, but people with high enough ‘hidden value’ of rule breaking tendencies could. The rapist that tried to kill Eugeo did something similar, he saw Eugeo as one of the Dark Territory residents in disguise and not a human, hence his ability to attempt to kill Eugeo. Cardinal mused if this inability to break rules was something Rath built into UW humans, and Kirito decided that’s impossible – they built the experiment in trying to break rules, not the other way around. (Flere821 note: They did find out by the end of this arc a US spy had written in some codes into UW that wasn’t part of Rath’s design, this was one of them)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flere821

Continued from above:

Spoiler for WEB Ch7 summary continued:

Before back on topic again, Kirito also asked for a helping of the corn soup Cardinal has. Cardinal snarked how Kirito really is a glutton before complying (Flere821 note: let’s see, the ‘hotdogs’ from Warmth of the Heart, his obsession with Asuna’s sandwich/food, the number of times he went off to buy snacks in UW before trotting back to a worried Eugeo… yeah, can’t argue with that ).
The final stages of the battle was Kuniela creating a zone of no system commands can be used, and spawned the most powerful weapon available in existence to physically fight. Seeing no choice Cardinal did the same and summoned her staff. Kuniela found one advantage she had; Kuniela had a 16 year old’s body, while Cardinal only had a 10 year old’s. Cardinal demonstrated this by standing up and taking off her robe, showing her small chest with white bra and her black shorts; her body doesn’t have the reach or strength (and the TL notes there’ll probably be this picture when the LN comes out, as there’s ALWAYS fanservice pics of some kind). Kirito noted similar things happened in SAO, where someone’s real life reach differes from other players’ and they had a disadvantage, or how in ALO their race’s trait (such as being large/small in size) is different to their real life body and they can’t get used to it.
The battle ended up as melee combat and Cardinal couldn’t physically match Kuniela, even though Cardinal made the first strike in system command attacks and Kuniela would have had her fluctlight destroyed the instant before her own one did. After three exchanges of strikes Cardinal lost. It was fortunate Kuniela sealed the use of system commands first before she sealed the room, otherwise Cardinal might not have escaped.
Cardinal spoke about the horror of being chased by Kuniela with her blade , feeling slashes onto her back. Kirito agreed that must have been horrifying, and Cardinal shot back Kirito needed to feel the same terror of a woman chasing after him with a weapon from all the womanizing he did within the last 2.5 years. Kirito fervently denied he did any such thing, then realised Cardinal has been stalking observing him for quite a while now.

Cardinal escaped, into one of two places even the Administrator cannot freely travel to. One is the Dark Territory, the other is the library of records they’re in right now. This library was created by the Administrator as a external storage space for her knowledge, and she made it impossible for others to access it. It takes a specific system command to access this place, and Cardinal used it before Kuniela did and locked the place up behind her. It’s easier to lock things up than to break it with system commands, and by the time Kuniela almost broke through the lock Cardinal made the library her’s and made the entrance disappear from the physical location in UW. The fact this library does not have a real physical location in UW to be broken into as part of the security played against Kuniela here. If they broke the walls all there will be is the void. Thus began Cardinal’s lonely experience for 200 years.

Kirito can’t even begin to understand how can someone live this long by herself, before remembering a human only have about 150 years of memory available to them; how does Cardinal here still function, then? Even with system commands Cardinal could not create something from nothing, so she can’t make a back-up just in case. The alternative, safer way she did was to erase all her memory as ‘Kuniela’, and 97% of the memory she had as Administrator, after putting them down onto paper (or some other physical records). She had no memory of her parents, how a bed feels like, and no emotion (Flere821 note: although later events – and how she snarked at Kirito before now - suggest she’s not as emotionless as she thinks). Cardinal sees herself solely as a program with the end goal of stopping Kuniela’s reign, no matter what she has to do.
(Flere821 note: I just noticed the narrative seems to suggest Kirito finds Cardinal beautiful whenever she acts like a kid her age rather than a weary old-timer, with words like ‘perfect smile’ and whatnot… goddamn it Kirito, another girl? You damn lolicon…)

Cardinal had tried to fight back within the last 200 years, but there’s a big difference between her and Kuniela – Kuniela has access to many minions and more resources. The Synthesis Knights can tip the scales towards Kuniela’s favour in a direct confrontation. These minions also help her govern the world, so she can lessen the intake of new memories. Now she rests on the top of the cathedral, reliving the memories of her past glory to further reduce additional information.

Kirito raised the point that that is indeed a advantage Kuniela has, but wouldn’t her minions betray her? From his experience in SAO there’s always conflict in large groups, the most notable example was how Divine Dragon’s Alliance ended up disbanded though Heathcliff’s KoB remained stable. (TL note: they look forward to if/when this eventually gets covered in Progressive). Cardinal said no betrayal is possible, due to ‘Ritual of Synthesis’ – they’re all puppets of the Adminstrator. The first Synthesis Knight was the legendary figure from back in Eugeo’s village, and Kirito thought this will be like him facing legendary figures from the past like Musashi. He tried to convince Cardinal this isn’t a shounen manga where after defeat they’ll somehow amazingly power-up, so there’s no way he can win. Cardinal gave him a look of “what the hell are you talking about?”. Of course this isn’t a manga, it’s a light novel =P

After many years the number of Synthesis Knights increased up to 50. Even taking into account border patrols and fighting against the Dark Territory, there will still be around 20 knights here in the Cathedral. Kirito thought it’s practically like he had just left the Town of Beginnings and the final boss dungeon is right in front of him.
Cardinal had been keeping a eye on Kirito, and a number of other people she might be able to recruit. Though most of the ones she found was taken by Kuniela and trained to be her minions, since Cardinal can only rely on her familiars while Kuniela can just open a window and see who has a high value of rule breaking tendencies. Cardinal revealed Charlotte, the familiar she stuck onto Kirito a while back and he never noticed. The winners of the tournaments are also inducted into a Synthesis Knight, the #30-50 are mostly such people. #1-20 are those with a high rule-breaking tendency values she captured. In a sense, Kirito was lucky they didn’t follow the original plan and win the tournament or they might have ended up as puppets.

After constant defeat Cardinal was thinking about giving up within the last 10 years. Kuniela steadily have gained influence while she herself have gained nothing, and have been losing hope. She questioned why it must be herself that corrects Kuniela’s mistakes, and started to yearn for the life she could have had as the 10 year old girl before she was erased; knowing nothing about the world, growing up, raising a family, and be surrounded by them on her deathbed. Originally it was on a whim Cardinal set her personality as a old woman, but now she felt more like one than ever. Rotting away with no future. Not even the Gods, Rath, has any interest in helping her even if they found this out. Kirito then knew Cardinal didn’t actually know about Rath, the real world, or have a connection to them, she figured all the truth of UW out with logic in the last 200 years.
Rath currently have been stepping up on the pressures to human society to try and see if it’ll force UW citizens to break the laws. Armies have started to amass in Dark Territory, and natural disasters have became more common. While the Dark Territory population is only half that of humans, there are vastly more combat-capable individuals in the goblins, beastmen and other races there. With how UW have stagnated and sword forms have been reduced to showmanship, UW will fall if Dark Territory invade. Administrator thinks she can defeat the Dark Territory with only her fifty Synthesis Knights, but Cardinal does not think it’s likely. Either way, the world will end, the only difference is if it’s by Kuniela’s deeds or that of the Dark Territory as they pillage and burn across human lands. 50 knights can’t hold ground, and even Kuniela will be defeated by the thousands of system command users within Dark Territory.

Cardinal knew there is no way out once Rath starts their pressure phase, so she wants to mercy-kill the entire UW, including the Dark Territory. While spending the next several hundred years to incorporate humanity with the other races is the best solution, it is not a possible one from what she has seen. Even if they stop Kuniela they can’t escape from Rath. It’s a military experiment after all, if UW tries to disobey they will just delete the whole thing and start anew. Cardinal likened this to fishes bred for consumption choosing to die by the hands of the fishermen or flop onto land and suffocate through their own actions. Cardinal offers Kirito her help to return back to the real world, if she became Administrator she can do so. In addition, she can use what little power she have to save ten Fluctlights and let them live on in the real world with Kirito. Ten of them is about the number Kirito can feasibly sneak out of Rath anyway, though Kirito doesn’t think he can choose between the ones he has met since coming into UW – and does he have the right to decide who gets to live solely because they have met him?

Cardinal went through how she found out about Kirito and Eugeo, when they cut down a tree that was supposedly to be impossible. Through Charlotte Cardinal found the reasons they got this powerful and how they cut the tree down. After Cardinal saw Kirito did things no UW citizen (little things, like feeding stray dogs) can do she knew Kirito isn’t bound by the laws of the world – if anyone else found that Kirito would have been instantly captured by the Church. And since Kirito isn’t from UW, his soul is in the STL and beyond the reach of the Administrator, so he is the best chance that can fight against the Administrator without being instantly deleted.

Kirito asked why didn’t Cardinal leave all this behind, start a new life and family, instead of spending 200 years in a library by herself? As part of Kuniela her blood from nobility should have been enough to break any bounds left on her by the laws. Cardinal replied as the subsystem her only desire is to stop Kuniela… before she remembered her one other desire. She told Kirito to get up, position his arms in a circle, and after much tsundere actions incoherent orders Kirito found himself hugging Cardinal, with her on a stool so her head is level with Kirito’s. Human contact, after 200 years, and Cardinal thought this as worth all the efforts she had put in so far with a few tears shed. Loneliness and dedication towards a goal will eventually dry up a person’s mind and soul, which needs to be sated by human interactions. Kirito was reminded of his time back in SAO where he dedicated himself to one goal no matter what (training to get that revive crystal) and felt he can sympathize with what Cardinal has went through.
After who-knows-how-long, Cardinal broke off and went back to being a enlightened sage, asking if Kirito is willing to help her. Kirito said yes, though he said he will also be looking for the third option that doesn’t involve everyone dying. Cardinal acknowledged that Kirito’s a hopeless idealist, but that’s within her tolerance. Kirito added he doesn’t want to see Cardinal die – if he had to choose ten people to leave with him, he’ll choose her as one of the ten. (Flere821 & TL Note: Another addition into his harem ^^; xD)
Cardinal’s eyes widened at his claim (Flere821: haremette ‘loli #2’ confirmed as obtained), before giving a sad laugh saying Kirito’s not just a idealist, but also a fool; even if she wants to leave she can’t, she’s part of this world and if she’s gone there’s no-one left to destroy it for the mercy-kill. Kirito says he understand that, but he’s also not giving up. Cardinal said one day he will understand the meaning of despair and giving up; but enough of that, time to go look for Eugeo and plan out their next moves.

Eugeo had finished reading, and asked what’s the time – they lost track of it. Cardinal said it’s been three hours, the sun’s up and it’s about 8am in the morning. Kirito gave a brief explanation on who Cardinal is/was (nothing that will break Eugeo’s mind), such as Cardinal used to be the High Priest and she’s helping them to take down Administrator. Eugeo asked if Cardinal knew anything about Alice; is the Alice from his village the same as Alice Synthesis Fifty? Cardinal said she’s been spending all her attention on him and Kirito, so she doesn’t know – though she says she knows how to remove the brainwashing Administrator had done to the knights. The memory circuit of the knights are sealed, someone they love have been erased from their mind and using that as basis of the change. This was shown when Kirito and Eugeo accidently influenced the brainwashing of Synthesis Twenty-Six they fought when they tried to escape. The memory fragment is the key to return them back to normal. If they want to get that they’ll have to reach the top of the cathedral, since the Administrator is likely to keep those fragments in her own room. Kirito wanted to stop the knights non-violently but Cardinal derided that as futile – all she can do is raise their equipment onto the same level as the Synthesis Knights, not to the point where they can afford to go easy on their opponents. It’s either slaughter a way to victory or die. Kirito asked is she not coming with them, and Cardinal says if she shows up it’ll instantly be the final battle – she’ll gladly go with them if they think they can stop 20 Synthesis Knights at once. Administrator right now still wants to brainwash Kirito and Eugeo, so she’ll be sending her knights after them in 2s and 3s to capture them alive. This way Kirito and Eugeo will still have a chance to victory.

Eugeo said he’s fine with fighting, even killing his opponents, however he can’t fight Alice as that’ll completely deny what he has accomplished within the last 2 years. Cardinal handed him and Kirito each a small dagger that weighed as much as a real sword, saying if that’s the case use these as their trump card; these daggers have no attacking power whatsoever, but if stabbed into their enemy it will have a path established with Cardinal and she can use her spells to take them down. Use it on Alice and she’ll instantly be asleep, and stay that way until they recover her memory fragment. As even system commands can’t create something out of nothing, those daggers are built upon her own sacrifice; a hundred years’ worth of hair. Cardinal joked if Kirito and Eugeo had shown up a month earlier they would be able to see her long hair that was her pride then. Kirito found even Cardinal has some similarities with normal girls in that she has pride in her hair and she felt sad she had to cut it off. These daggers were originally made to use against the Administrator, so make sure when they use it it counts. Eugeo asks if it’s alright for him to use something there’s only two of in the world, and Cardinal says it’s fine. She almost let slip they will all die anyway so it doesn’t matter. Kirito inwardly vowed to include Eugeo, Alice, and Cardinal among the ten he can save, even if he has to trick Cardinal into coming with him. He then shamefully realised that meant he in a way agreed to Cardinal’s solution, but he resolved he’ll save them even at the cost of this world.

Kirito then raised the point if system commands can’t make something out of nothing, then where did the food they ate came from? Cardinal smiled and said all she did was use some worthless history books as raw material. Eugeo, as the history fanatic, choked at this revelation and said no they don’t need any more food when Cardinal offered to make some more.
Kirito had thought they’d get the best gear in-game before remembering Cardinal can’t make something out of nothing. Cardinal started to think if she had chosen the right person after Kirito found out he won’t be getting the stuff he thought he’d get. She then explained even without her they’d still have the best gear anyway, one is a sword belonging to one of 4 dragon knights, the other was made from material of a tree that had absorbed resources from a large area for the past several hundred years. Add to the fact they know how to use these powerful weapons they should be fine. Kirito was reminded of fools in SAO that got some rare drops and then went to test them out, but then their inexperience killed them when the NPCs attacked.

Kirito and Eugeo’s swords are at level 3. Their final destination is at level 100. Kirito had thought this will be a long quest and asked if they can start at level 50 instead, but Eugeo reminded them they wanted to keep the opponent separate. More space to cover means less likely to find the knights all in one place. Cardinal then reminded them of one more thing, that Synthesis Knights have abilities with their weapons that make them a extension of their body and have other special effects. Cardinal gave them 3 hours to write up a code/spell that will unlock their own weapon’s abilities (Kirito’s is a branch, Eugeo’s sword at the very basis is ice that can never melt). The harsh time constraints was because it has almost been 24 hours since they lost their swords, any longer they will lose ownership over it.

Three hours later, Kirito and Eugeo got some sort of code working (though Cardinal said those were really inefficient code) and Cardinal dropped them off close to the room where they have their swords. Cardinal left the world’s fate in their hands and let them decide whether the world will bathe in hellfire, fall into the void, or *looks at Kirito* there may be some third option. They left the room, and started their mission.

Ya don't think anyone can actually die in UW, they probably just use a system command to do some sort of ressurection

The first parents of the UW fluctlights died, though that was more like them needing a reason to logout.
In Vol.9 it is mentioned 200 or so died from an epidemic to test reactions and Eugeo said that after a certain age the life durability of a human unit decreases until they die (reaches zero). Besides, Eugeo nearly died due to the slash wound against the goblins in Vol.9.

The first parents of the UW fluctlights died, though that was more like them needing a reason to logout.
In Vol.9 it is mentioned 200 or so died from an epidemic to test reactions and Eugeo said that after a certain age the life durability of a human unit decreases until they die (reaches zero). Besides, Eugeo nearly died due to the slash wound against the goblins in Vol.9.

Ya but if you remember when they where showing off the fluctlights to Asuna in Volume 9, they pretty much loaded it and it died, or broke down, like they had done many times before. So that tells me the fluctlights are always backed up and can be tweaked and reloaded, in such a way.

We watch the animes because it gives form to certain scenes that we are not satisfied with just reading the text. For me, if there's a Visual Novel for SAO I would've lunged at the first opportunity because I believe that it will provide the equivalent of both experiences (and the action scenes would be infinitely better as well). But since there's none I'll just have to do them both.

Went back to re-read ALO because my novel memory on that was vague. So far the anime has done an excellent job on ALO - much, much better than the original SAO really - probably because of how short ALO originally is.

Chinese translations on WEB Ch7 is about half done, this part is a lot longer than previous parts. Here’s a summary of it (will be continued in my next post):

Spoiler for Ch7 1st half:

This chapter really shows how bad it can get when humans try to pose as gods. Intellectually we readers understood UW was created as an experiment, but it's another to see the place designed for bloodshed and the recreation of pillage and war first hand emotionally through the narrative.

Kirito and Eugeo was captured by Alice before, they escaped the dungeons, and before they got hunted down they were rescued by a girl that looked around 10 years old with light brown hair but talked like a old woman (more precisely, a old woman using old English, with her words in English approximately using words like ‘Thou’ and so on). Using ‘magic’ Eugeo and Kirito was taken into a library that housed the records of everything in UW since its creation, the coding for the world and the System Command lists. The girl revealed herself to be named ‘Cardinal’ (as in, from the Cardinal System – explanation will come up later). As Kirito understood it the Cardinal System does not have a anthropomorphic avatar of sorts, even in games like ALO and GGO. Kirito and Eugeo was given food to heal all their wounds taken from escaping, and Eugeo asked where the history section of UW is, and Cardinal pointed him to the ‘Corridor of History’. After Eugeo left Cardinal sighed and said the history of the world and those records are only fakes written by the priests, and Kirito took the chance to clarify some things (Flere821 note: go make a sandwich, grab a drink or something, this is going to take a while to explain).

The three gods as UW know it does not exist, only as accounts with more abilities than others – and those accounts have never logged into UW even once before now. Cardinal confirmed this world is made by Rath, and she’s a offshoot of the Cardinal System designed by Kayaba. Cardinal was surprised Kirito knew about Kayaba, and found how Kirito knew other versions of the Cardinal interesting.

Cardinal went through how Feudalism came to be set up in UW – the developers didn’t put that in themselves. Cardinal doesn’t have the means to talk to the ‘Real World’, that is something only the Adminstrator of UW have. Because of certain events (will be explained later) Cardinal has lost a lot of her abilities, and unlike the other Cardinal systems Kirito knew she’s not omniscient within the setting. Back to the topic of Feudalism, of the four humans that took care of the first Fluctlights one of them was not the morally upright person Rath thought he was. It may have been unintentional, but his ambition, desire to satisfy his own wants, and desire to control others – basically the darker side of human nature – have infected two of the 8 fluctlights. (As an aside, Cardinal cannot access the names of the four people; so Kirito couldn’t be forewarned by who within Rath might be a traitor or intending to harm him). These negative traits was bred out if people married lower class nobles or commoners, but for those that maintained blood purity of ‘nobility’ there was a much higher chance of inheriting these negative traits (like the scheming rapists from previous chapter). The current Pope is the one that led to Feudalism being installed, and she had taken the name ‘Adminstrator’. (Kirito was surprised that the Pope was a ‘she’ – to him Popes are normally wizened old men with plenty of life experience). In a sense, the Adminstrator was Cardinal’s mother (more on that later).

Feudalism was installed 350 years ago, 100 years after the experiment started. At the time UW citizens are married around 20, and each family have on average 5 children. By 5th generation the population of UW is around 500 people (marriage and birth mechanics will be skipped here, it’s a aside to the plot).
From these people, the ones with domination desires took the land of people around them and became leaders, and made people who lost their land servants. Those that disagreed with them went to pioneer other settlements near the outer edge. There was hostility between the various leaders, and there is very little marriage between them. This all changed when from one of these few political marriages a girl named Kuniela (Note: I’m bad with names, so this might not be the correct spelling) was born. She had the strongest negative desires of people being born ever at that time. She was amazingly talented, in multiple areas such as sword skill, system commands, singing, sewing etc. She could have excelled in any lifelong career she was assigned to, but her father that was in charge of giving them wanted to keep her close by and gave her the career of practicing system commands (ie, like a priest). Kuniela figured out system commands aren’t meaningless words, but of a different language, and eventually figured out a spell to launch fire arrows.

She then took advantage of the ‘exp system’ of UW, by defeating other creatures in UW you can gain exp in the ‘System Access Authority’ of UW. Most people are kind-natured, and do not like to harm animals without reason, but the tainted nobility was the exceptions. At age 11 Kuniela went on nightly hunting trips killing foxes and other animals, and to keep the balance the Cardinal (before she had a sense of self) replenished the surroundings as per the system. Kirito understood the idea, he went level grinding himself back in SAO, but for some reason he felt horrified at what Kuniela has done. It’s like something from a nightmare, a small girl dressed in her pyjamas and unflinchingly burning anything she came across at night. Kuniela’s level increased steadily, along with her understanding of system commands. She eventually mastered healing and weather forecasting, and along with her beauty by age 13 she seemed like an angel or divine descent.

Cardinal said Rath the biggest mistake they made was introducing the concept of God to explain the system commands. To humans, the existence of the divine is the most effective painkiller, with it humans can endure any kind of pain, and commit any kind of sins without guilt. With Kuniela’s deeds she established a Church and her own ‘divine’ authority she established herself as the ruler of UW. Kirito thought Kuniela had some decency left in her, or otherwise why add further restrictions in killing when the system forbid it? Cardinal explained it was because Kuniela didn’t want anyone else to reach the same power as she did, and killing humans is one of the fastest ways to gain exp.

Cardinal also refuted Kirito’s claims humans by nature are kind-hearted beings – UW citizens are only this way because of Rath’s meddling. The Goblins from Dark Territoty Kirito had met that had tried to kill him and Eugeo are also Fluctlights, given the opposite commands as the ones in UW; to kill, to forcibly take things, they are the product of fluctlights following the more basic human desires. Kirio had known something was off when he fought them, those weren’t like NPCs; their movements were too natural, they had sparks of life in their eyes. But he had never thought this might be the case. Kirito was tormented for a moment how he had killed another human (the Goblin captain), before Cardinal cut him off of his thoughts. He is not God, and there are some things that can’t be solved even after one or two hundred years of thought.

Cardinal thought of herself as a God once, and intervened in the world uncaring of what life actually is, following the laws of the world. It was only after obtaining a body that she started thinking about life. The world’s creators, Rath, probably have no idea what they have created and even then they are not omnipotent Gods. With the coming pressure experiments UW as it is now will become a living hell. Back to Kuniela, the Church’s laws was expanded (like do not feed sheep certain types of grass that will take away their ability to produce milk, or do not go into bogs that have poisonous gasses) and people lost their ability to think for themselves and relied on the Church for almost everything. They no longer question the authority of the Church. The main cathedral, first from a measly 3 floor high building eventually became higher and higher, like a symbol of her insatiable desires. Kuniela reached age 30, then 40, her body slowly being influenced by age. She left ruling UW to her minions and tried to research a way to extend her life, breaking the bounds of age. Her efforts produced no results however, and by the time she was over 60 her body was frail and her beauty was all gone. On her deathbed at age 80 she refused to give up however, and tried all kinds of combinations to find a way. Cardinal said Kuniela’s chances of success was smaller than throwing a thousand coins and expects them all to land heads up… but she succeeded. Even Cardinal was horrified at her obsession.

The command “System Call: Inspect Entire Command List” opened up an A4 sized window that basically gave her access to the root code of the world. Cardinal said this was another huge mistake Rath made, they should have eliminated this command after the four was logged out. At the bottom of the list was the command she needed, the emergency command that allows someone to take control of the world to restore balance – take control of all of the Cardinal System’s abilities and make yourself literally the God of the world. Kirito thought Rath really could not have kept this world under control; all of their personnel was basically in their thirties, and Kuniela had 80 years of life experience by then to find a way to break the system. Rath controlling the situation now was even less likely, with Kuniela having about another 300 years of experience.

Kirito’s worry was interrupted by Cardinal – she said it’s too early to start being afraid.
To build things up for later explanation, Cardinal explained how when the four humans was raising their kids there were other NPCs around them – after all, it’s strange for a world to only have two families. These were limited AIs, artificial Fluctlights without their own will.

Anyway, after Kuniela found this command she reset her age to 16 and removed the upper limit to her age. Kuniela was ecstatic to have recovered her youth and beauty, which Cardinal remarked no male would ever understand how happy she would have been. Kirito remarked that even he knew that’s the dream of all women, but Cardinal’s wasn’t convinced at his understanding. Cardinal remarked even she would have preferred an appearance maybe 5-6 years older than what she had right now…
Putting that aside, Cardinal continued on with her narration. Kuniela’s reasoning was affected by the joy of eternal youth and beauty, plus command over human territory. Cardinal seemed to be either laughing at human foolishness here, or maybe pitying it. Kuniela’s desire knows no bounds, and she could not accept another entity having the same authority as she did. Even if that entity is the Cardinal System, a program without its own will. Kuniela spent the night reading the instruction manual to use the full command list, but she only has a limited understanding of it because ultimately she’s a citizen of UW and not a scientifically-minded human. She tried to incorporate the Cardinal System into her own self, and she made her one and only mistake then. The motivation for the Cardinal System ended up overwriting her own desires within her own Fluctlight, and this was irreversible. Cardinal said it was a pity the Cardinal System’s driving motivation was not incompatible with Kuniela’s, as her Fluctlight would have broken apart under the paradox and solved a lot of problems right there. The motivation was ‘keep the current state as it is’ – as Kirito knew, if there was a good way to get rich very quickly or to power-level easily the Cardinal System would find it and correct it, for example by re-pricing items or making monsters harder to kill. Cardinal smirked at Kirito’s own complaints how once upon a time (ie, SAO) he and others tried to trick the Cardinal System but ended up failing. She has her own pride that no matter how many brats gather they can’t beat the system (ie, herself), this gave her a look more matching her 10-year old body that her old woman atmosphere earlier.

Due to Kuniela’s change, she wanted to keep things as it is so she used her new powers to make the walls separating the UW into quarters and declared the four most powerful nobles as Kings. This decreases human interaction and new ideas that can result from those, and things have stayed the same for 270 years after that. When before Kuniela had considered a reform to make things for the better for the commoners, now she no longer cares and strangles any signs of change. She placed similar symbols around UW to limit the pioneers’ expansion, such as boulders that can’t be broken, streams that can’t be crossed, trees that can’t be cut down etc. 50 years after Administrator took power nothing have changed and nobility has stagnated, and became even more worthless than before. 70 years after Kuniela became Administrator, she found she reached the limits of human memory – she lost memory of things that happened a few days before, occasionally when sleeping she loses consciousness, and she forgot some of the system commands from before. To address this Kuniela took in one of the Sisters-in-training that was in the cathedral and said she’ll make her the successor of UW. From the description the sister was only about 10 years old and with light brown hair, which Kirito deduced it’s talking about Cardinal in front of her. Kuniela attempted to overwrite the girl’s Fluctlight with her own, as a spare copy in case when she tries to fix herself by erasing some memories she breaks some part of her own soul. The same way people make back-up copies of important files before messing with them.

However, this was the second mistake Kuniela made; when her back-up copy was made and before she fixed herself, there was two Administrators in the same room with equal power. The Cardinal System split off, one is the main system that checks the entire game and the other became a subsystem to check the main system for bugs. Exactly like the SAO Cardinal system Kirito was familiar with. The second core system was the Cardinal which is in front of Kirito right now, finally free after being taken into Kuniela 70 years before she left. In a sense this Cardinal was a split personality of the original Kuniela given form. While Kirito stated in real life the existence of split personalities are debatable Cardinal said that was a good fit for what happened to them in UW. This Cardinal was operating when Kuniela’s desires was not that high at times, and when she was conscious she tried to correct the mistakes Kunela made. Cardinal attempted many suicides (jumping off the top of the cathedral (100 floors high) – 3 times. Stabbing self in the heart – 2 times. Using system command to burn herself alive – 2 times) to correct what Kuniela had accomplished. Even as the Administrator, if her health goes to zero she will still be destroyed. With literally the final drop of HP left Kuniela regained control of her body, so Cardinal could not finish the job.

To stop Cardinal killing her, Kuniela sealed away her own emotions and perfected the ‘Ritual of Synthesis’, basically cutting apart people’s fluctlights and stripping them of their personalities. The Synthesis Knights was basically the test subjects, in exchange for near-immortality and skills beyond mortals they are only puppets of Kuniela. Administrator is now like a machine, and only when Kuniela tried to make a back-up copy did Cardinal manage to free herself. After they saw each other when Kuniela finished operating on herself and deleting some memories, she failed to instantly eliminate Cardinal. Both of them felt fear that one of them is the exact same copy of themselves and they fought. Instinctive enmity and fear led them to fight, two Gods warring for three days and night upon the top of the cathedral. The original fluctlight in the 10 year old girl’s collapsed from the strain first, and that led to a fundamentally difference between Kuniela and Cardinal enough to make them seem different.

Kirito asked how the Administrator could break the taboo of killing another human, and Cardinal explained it’s a matter of perception. She demonstrated the rules of ‘teacup cannot directly touch the table, it needs a saucer underneaths it’ – even after so many years she could not bring herself to break that deeply ingrained rule from Kuniela’s childhood, but change the cup’s content from ‘tea’ to ‘soup’ she could put the cup down directly; it’s no longer a ‘tea’cup but a ‘soup’cup. Most people would not even be able to think about why they can’t put the teacup down directly, but people with high enough ‘hidden value’ of rule breaking tendencies could. The rapist that tried to kill Eugeo did something similar, he saw Eugeo as one of the Dark Territory residents in disguise and not a human, hence his ability to attempt to kill Eugeo. Cardinal mused if this inability to break rules was something Rath built into UW humans, and Kirito decided that’s impossible – they built the experiment in trying to break rules, not the other way around. (Flere821 note: They did find out by the end of this arc a US spy had written in some codes into UW that wasn’t part of Rath’s design, this was one of them)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flere821

Continued from above:

Spoiler for WEB Ch7 summary continued:

Before back on topic again, Kirito also asked for a helping of the corn soup Cardinal has. Cardinal snarked how Kirito really is a glutton before complying (Flere821 note: let’s see, the ‘hotdogs’ from Warmth of the Heart, his obsession with Asuna’s sandwich/food, the number of times he went off to buy snacks in UW before trotting back to a worried Eugeo… yeah, can’t argue with that ).
The final stages of the battle was Kuniela creating a zone of no system commands can be used, and spawned the most powerful weapon available in existence to physically fight. Seeing no choice Cardinal did the same and summoned her staff. Kuniela found one advantage she had; Kuniela had a 16 year old’s body, while Cardinal only had a 10 year old’s. Cardinal demonstrated this by standing up and taking off her robe, showing her small chest with white bra and her black shorts; her body doesn’t have the reach or strength (and the TL notes there’ll probably be this picture when the LN comes out, as there’s ALWAYS fanservice pics of some kind). Kirito noted similar things happened in SAO, where someone’s real life reach differes from other players’ and they had a disadvantage, or how in ALO their race’s trait (such as being large/small in size) is different to their real life body and they can’t get used to it.
The battle ended up as melee combat and Cardinal couldn’t physically match Kuniela, even though Cardinal made the first strike in system command attacks and Kuniela would have had her fluctlight destroyed the instant before her own one did. After three exchanges of strikes Cardinal lost. It was fortunate Kuniela sealed the use of system commands first before she sealed the room, otherwise Cardinal might not have escaped.
Cardinal spoke about the horror of being chased by Kuniela with her blade , feeling slashes onto her back. Kirito agreed that must have been horrifying, and Cardinal shot back Kirito needed to feel the same terror of a woman chasing after him with a weapon from all the womanizing he did within the last 2.5 years. Kirito fervently denied he did any such thing, then realised Cardinal has been stalking observing him for quite a while now.

Cardinal escaped, into one of two places even the Administrator cannot freely travel to. One is the Dark Territory, the other is the library of records they’re in right now. This library was created by the Administrator as a external storage space for her knowledge, and she made it impossible for others to access it. It takes a specific system command to access this place, and Cardinal used it before Kuniela did and locked the place up behind her. It’s easier to lock things up than to break it with system commands, and by the time Kuniela almost broke through the lock Cardinal made the library her’s and made the entrance disappear from the physical location in UW. The fact this library does not have a real physical location in UW to be broken into as part of the security played against Kuniela here. If they broke the walls all there will be is the void. Thus began Cardinal’s lonely experience for 200 years.

Kirito can’t even begin to understand how can someone live this long by herself, before remembering a human only have about 150 years of memory available to them; how does Cardinal here still function, then? Even with system commands Cardinal could not create something from nothing, so she can’t make a back-up just in case. The alternative, safer way she did was to erase all her memory as ‘Kuniela’, and 97% of the memory she had as Administrator, after putting them down onto paper (or some other physical records). She had no memory of her parents, how a bed feels like, and no emotion (Flere821 note: although later events – and how she snarked at Kirito before now - suggest she’s not as emotionless as she thinks). Cardinal sees herself solely as a program with the end goal of stopping Kuniela’s reign, no matter what she has to do.
(Flere821 note: I just noticed the narrative seems to suggest Kirito finds Cardinal beautiful whenever she acts like a kid her age rather than a weary old-timer, with words like ‘perfect smile’ and whatnot… goddamn it Kirito, another girl? You damn lolicon…)

Cardinal had tried to fight back within the last 200 years, but there’s a big difference between her and Kuniela – Kuniela has access to many minions and more resources. The Synthesis Knights can tip the scales towards Kuniela’s favour in a direct confrontation. These minions also help her govern the world, so she can lessen the intake of new memories. Now she rests on the top of the cathedral, reliving the memories of her past glory to further reduce additional information.

Kirito raised the point that that is indeed a advantage Kuniela has, but wouldn’t her minions betray her? From his experience in SAO there’s always conflict in large groups, the most notable example was how Divine Dragon’s Alliance ended up disbanded though Heathcliff’s KoB remained stable. (TL note: they look forward to if/when this eventually gets covered in Progressive). Cardinal said no betrayal is possible, due to ‘Ritual of Synthesis’ – they’re all puppets of the Adminstrator. The first Synthesis Knight was the legendary figure from back in Eugeo’s village, and Kirito thought this will be like him facing legendary figures from the past like Musashi. He tried to convince Cardinal this isn’t a shounen manga where after defeat they’ll somehow amazingly power-up, so there’s no way he can win. Cardinal gave him a look of “what the hell are you talking about?”. Of course this isn’t a manga, it’s a light novel =P

After many years the number of Synthesis Knights increased up to 50. Even taking into account border patrols and fighting against the Dark Territory, there will still be around 20 knights here in the Cathedral. Kirito thought it’s practically like he had just left the Town of Beginnings and the final boss dungeon is right in front of him.
Cardinal had been keeping a eye on Kirito, and a number of other people she might be able to recruit. Though most of the ones she found was taken by Kuniela and trained to be her minions, since Cardinal can only rely on her familiars while Kuniela can just open a window and see who has a high value of rule breaking tendencies. Cardinal revealed Charlotte, the familiar she stuck onto Kirito a while back and he never noticed. The winners of the tournaments are also inducted into a Synthesis Knight, the #30-50 are mostly such people. #1-20 are those with a high rule-breaking tendency values she captured. In a sense, Kirito was lucky they didn’t follow the original plan and win the tournament or they might have ended up as puppets.

After constant defeat Cardinal was thinking about giving up within the last 10 years. Kuniela steadily have gained influence while she herself have gained nothing, and have been losing hope. She questioned why it must be herself that corrects Kuniela’s mistakes, and started to yearn for the life she could have had as the 10 year old girl before she was erased; knowing nothing about the world, growing up, raising a family, and be surrounded by them on her deathbed. Originally it was on a whim Cardinal set her personality as a old woman, but now she felt more like one than ever. Rotting away with no future. Not even the Gods, Rath, has any interest in helping her even if they found this out. Kirito then knew Cardinal didn’t actually know about Rath, the real world, or have a connection to them, she figured all the truth of UW out with logic in the last 200 years.
Rath currently have been stepping up on the pressures to human society to try and see if it’ll force UW citizens to break the laws. Armies have started to amass in Dark Territory, and natural disasters have became more common. While the Dark Territory population is only half that of humans, there are vastly more combat-capable individuals in the goblins, beastmen and other races there. With how UW have stagnated and sword forms have been reduced to showmanship, UW will fall if Dark Territory invade. Administrator thinks she can defeat the Dark Territory with only her fifty Synthesis Knights, but Cardinal does not think it’s likely. Either way, the world will end, the only difference is if it’s by Kuniela’s deeds or that of the Dark Territory as they pillage and burn across human lands. 50 knights can’t hold ground, and even Kuniela will be defeated by the thousands of system command users within Dark Territory.

Cardinal knew there is no way out once Rath starts their pressure phase, so she wants to mercy-kill the entire UW, including the Dark Territory. While spending the next several hundred years to incorporate humanity with the other races is the best solution, it is not a possible one from what she has seen. Even if they stop Kuniela they can’t escape from Rath. It’s a military experiment after all, if UW tries to disobey they will just delete the whole thing and start anew. Cardinal likened this to fishes bred for consumption choosing to die by the hands of the fishermen or flop onto land and suffocate through their own actions. Cardinal offers Kirito her help to return back to the real world, if she became Administrator she can do so. In addition, she can use what little power she have to save ten Fluctlights and let them live on in the real world with Kirito. Ten of them is about the number Kirito can feasibly sneak out of Rath anyway, though Kirito doesn’t think he can choose between the ones he has met since coming into UW – and does he have the right to decide who gets to live solely because they have met him?

Cardinal went through how she found out about Kirito and Eugeo, when they cut down a tree that was supposedly to be impossible. Through Charlotte Cardinal found the reasons they got this powerful and how they cut the tree down. After Cardinal saw Kirito did things no UW citizen (little things, like feeding stray dogs) can do she knew Kirito isn’t bound by the laws of the world – if anyone else found that Kirito would have been instantly captured by the Church. And since Kirito isn’t from UW, his soul is in the STL and beyond the reach of the Administrator, so he is the best chance that can fight against the Administrator without being instantly deleted.

Kirito asked why didn’t Cardinal leave all this behind, start a new life and family, instead of spending 200 years in a library by herself? As part of Kuniela her blood from nobility should have been enough to break any bounds left on her by the laws. Cardinal replied as the subsystem her only desire is to stop Kuniela… before she remembered her one other desire. She told Kirito to get up, position his arms in a circle, and after much tsundere actions incoherent orders Kirito found himself hugging Cardinal, with her on a stool so her head is level with Kirito’s. Human contact, after 200 years, and Cardinal thought this as worth all the efforts she had put in so far with a few tears shed. Loneliness and dedication towards a goal will eventually dry up a person’s mind and soul, which needs to be sated by human interactions. Kirito was reminded of his time back in SAO where he dedicated himself to one goal no matter what (training to get that revive crystal) and felt he can sympathize with what Cardinal has went through.
After who-knows-how-long, Cardinal broke off and went back to being a enlightened sage, asking if Kirito is willing to help her. Kirito said yes, though he said he will also be looking for the third option that doesn’t involve everyone dying. Cardinal acknowledged that Kirito’s a hopeless idealist, but that’s within her tolerance. Kirito added he doesn’t want to see Cardinal die – if he had to choose ten people to leave with him, he’ll choose her as one of the ten. (Flere821 & TL Note: Another addition into his harem ^^; xD)
Cardinal’s eyes widened at his claim (Flere821: haremette ‘loli #2’ confirmed as obtained), before giving a sad laugh saying Kirito’s not just a idealist, but also a fool; even if she wants to leave she can’t, she’s part of this world and if she’s gone there’s no-one left to destroy it for the mercy-kill. Kirito says he understand that, but he’s also not giving up. Cardinal said one day he will understand the meaning of despair and giving up; but enough of that, time to go look for Eugeo and plan out their next moves.

Eugeo had finished reading, and asked what’s the time – they lost track of it. Cardinal said it’s been three hours, the sun’s up and it’s about 8am in the morning. Kirito gave a brief explanation on who Cardinal is/was (nothing that will break Eugeo’s mind), such as Cardinal used to be the High Priest and she’s helping them to take down Administrator. Eugeo asked if Cardinal knew anything about Alice; is the Alice from his village the same as Alice Synthesis Fifty? Cardinal said she’s been spending all her attention on him and Kirito, so she doesn’t know – though she says she knows how to remove the brainwashing Administrator had done to the knights. The memory circuit of the knights are sealed, someone they love have been erased from their mind and using that as basis of the change. This was shown when Kirito and Eugeo accidently influenced the brainwashing of Synthesis Twenty-Six they fought when they tried to escape. The memory fragment is the key to return them back to normal. If they want to get that they’ll have to reach the top of the cathedral, since the Administrator is likely to keep those fragments in her own room. Kirito wanted to stop the knights non-violently but Cardinal derided that as futile – all she can do is raise their equipment onto the same level as the Synthesis Knights, not to the point where they can afford to go easy on their opponents. It’s either slaughter a way to victory or die. Kirito asked is she not coming with them, and Cardinal says if she shows up it’ll instantly be the final battle – she’ll gladly go with them if they think they can stop 20 Synthesis Knights at once. Administrator right now still wants to brainwash Kirito and Eugeo, so she’ll be sending her knights after them in 2s and 3s to capture them alive. This way Kirito and Eugeo will still have a chance to victory.

Eugeo said he’s fine with fighting, even killing his opponents, however he can’t fight Alice as that’ll completely deny what he has accomplished within the last 2 years. Cardinal handed him and Kirito each a small dagger that weighed as much as a real sword, saying if that’s the case use these as their trump card; these daggers have no attacking power whatsoever, but if stabbed into their enemy it will have a path established with Cardinal and she can use her spells to take them down. Use it on Alice and she’ll instantly be asleep, and stay that way until they recover her memory fragment. As even system commands can’t create something out of nothing, those daggers are built upon her own sacrifice; a hundred years’ worth of hair. Cardinal joked if Kirito and Eugeo had shown up a month earlier they would be able to see her long hair that was her pride then. Kirito found even Cardinal has some similarities with normal girls in that she has pride in her hair and she felt sad she had to cut it off. These daggers were originally made to use against the Administrator, so make sure when they use it it counts. Eugeo asks if it’s alright for him to use something there’s only two of in the world, and Cardinal says it’s fine. She almost let slip they will all die anyway so it doesn’t matter. Kirito inwardly vowed to include Eugeo, Alice, and Cardinal among the ten he can save, even if he has to trick Cardinal into coming with him. He then shamefully realised that meant he in a way agreed to Cardinal’s solution, but he resolved he’ll save them even at the cost of this world.

Kirito then raised the point if system commands can’t make something out of nothing, then where did the food they ate came from? Cardinal smiled and said all she did was use some worthless history books as raw material. Eugeo, as the history fanatic, choked at this revelation and said no they don’t need any more food when Cardinal offered to make some more.
Kirito had thought they’d get the best gear in-game before remembering Cardinal can’t make something out of nothing. Cardinal started to think if she had chosen the right person after Kirito found out he won’t be getting the stuff he thought he’d get. She then explained even without her they’d still have the best gear anyway, one is a sword belonging to one of 4 dragon knights, the other was made from material of a tree that had absorbed resources from a large area for the past several hundred years. Add to the fact they know how to use these powerful weapons they should be fine. Kirito was reminded of fools in SAO that got some rare drops and then went to test them out, but then their inexperience killed them when the NPCs attacked.

Kirito and Eugeo’s swords are at level 3. Their final destination is at level 100. Kirito had thought this will be a long quest and asked if they can start at level 50 instead, but Eugeo reminded them they wanted to keep the opponent separate. More space to cover means less likely to find the knights all in one place. Cardinal then reminded them of one more thing, that Synthesis Knights have abilities with their weapons that make them a extension of their body and have other special effects. Cardinal gave them 3 hours to write up a code/spell that will unlock their own weapon’s abilities (Kirito’s is a branch, Eugeo’s sword at the very basis is ice that can never melt). The harsh time constraints was because it has almost been 24 hours since they lost their swords, any longer they will lose ownership over it.

Three hours later, Kirito and Eugeo got some sort of code working (though Cardinal said those were really inefficient code) and Cardinal dropped them off close to the room where they have their swords. Cardinal left the world’s fate in their hands and let them decide whether the world will bathe in hellfire, fall into the void, or *looks at Kirito* there may be some third option. They left the room, and started their mission.

I love you(r summaries/synopsis) :P

Seriously, on series that I love, I really just can't help but revel in spoilers and look for as much info about it as possible LOL.

So much world building. Everything makes more sense now. Hell it even ties back all the way to SAO and ALO. Sending shivers down my spine.

TBH, I just really don't see why SAO gets so much hate when it gets pretty deep like this.

The Chinese translators had already finished Part 3 of Chapter 7 yesterday. It's not a long story though.

Spoiler for Alicization Chapter 7 Part 3:

Right after Kirito and Eugeo left Cardinal's library, they went to the weapons storeroom at third floor to take back their swords but unexpectedly they encountered arrows when they tried to leave the storeroom. Their opponent was a Synthesis Knight with only arrows and a huge bow. Kirito used magic to temporarily blind the knight and Eugeo charged ahead towards him but the knight quickly recovered and then proceeded to shoot all his arrows simultaneously towards them. Kirito and Eugeo barely managed to avoid the arrows. The knight, stunned by their strengths, activated his "Weapon Recollection". Through his "Weapon Recollection", the knight can generate and shoot powerful flame arrow. Kirito devised a plan that he will hold off the knight's flame arrow while Eugeo will move towards the knight to fight him one-to-one since Kirito figured out that the knight can't shoot the arrow more than one time. The flame arrow did penetrated Kirito's ten ice shields but at the same time Eugeo was already in front of the knight. The knight who once again stunned, tried to counter with his fist, however Eugeo blocked it with his sword and finally defeated the knight with his sword skill.

The beaten knight then told Kirito and Eugeo that there were about 12 knights waiting for them at the 50th floor and they might not have a winning chance against those knights. Kirito wondered why he tell them this piece of information. The knight answered that he had failed his mission given by Administrator and had no right to be a Synthesis Knight anymore. He pleaded for them to kill him, Deusolbart Synthesis Seven for good but Eugeo started to rage when he heard this name because he realised that the man in front of him was the knight who captured Alice eight and the half years ago. Eugeo in rage mode tried to kill the man he hated so much brutally but Kirito stopped him, stated that the man in front of them might have his memories of having captured Alice deleted by Administrator. Deusolbart really showed no recollection of his capture of Alice and also pretty much shaken by this fact. Kirito and Eugeo left the shocked Deusolbart behind with Kirito noting Deusolbart: "What you want to do later is up to you to decide. Whether you wish to go back to where Administrator is to receive punishment from her or just heal your wound and chase after us, or maybe....".

While running up the stairs, Eugeo had a feeling that the knight will not chase after them anymore.

We have no idea how the real novel will fluctuate from the web ones though. Anything that happens there might undergo a massive change, so I personally think it's pointless to read the old web novels.

There might be massive changes, but there might also not be any - for example there's no major changes in Progressive Vol1 plot compared to WEB version. Besides, after reading some of what happened I'd like to know what happened next, especially when there's already one version out there. If nothing else it'll be interesting to see what's different between LN version and WEB version - my summaries of WEB vol2 earlier showed SAO could have feasibly been adapted into a eroge on par or better than Fate/Stay Night with a few tweaks

Quote:

Originally Posted by Netto Azure

I love you(r summaries/synopsis) :P

Thanks

Quote:

Seriously, on series that I love, I really just can't help but revel in spoilers and look for as much info about it as possible LOL.

For some series I'd prefer to avoid spoilers, but SAO is one of the ones that I'd prefer to dig for info and see what happened next like this, yeah.

Quote:

TBH, I just really don't see why SAO gets so much hate when it gets pretty deep like this.

SAO is good, but it isn't without its flaws and/or some people prefer different kinds of plot/character. Time-skips are liberally used, some people don't like a hyper-competent protagonist that doesn't seem to be able to fail when the chips are down (as opposed to a protagonist that develops from 'level 1', so to speak), and disregarding whether the use of NTR is effective story-telling or not some people don't like reading about it at all in a story. It's understandable there'll be people out there that don't like SAO, even taking into account the usual 'Haters gonna Hate' crowd that shows up in every fanbase regardless of the series.